JD Edwards & Company, a leading provider of agile, collaborative solutions for the Internet economy, recently announced the general availability of eXtended Business Processes (XBPs).
Building on JD Edwards` XPI middleware product, XBPs are pre-set, fully executable business processes that tie applications and enterprises together. The XBPs have been developed and pre-defined by leveraging the company`s existing applications as well as its depth of experience in specific industry sectors.
Released in January, XPI laid the groundwork for XBPs that would allow multiple applications, including CRM, e-procurement, supply chain, financial management and fulfilment, to share and integrate data in real-time across the enterprise and beyond to trading partners. For example, when a customer places an order on the Web, the order will trigger applications in the supply chain business process, from order tracking to inventory management to customer invoicing.
"XPI drastically reduces the cost of keeping a flexible software infrastructure by utilising pre-configured XBPs to take much of the burden of integration off the customers` shoulder allowing them to focus on the fundamentals of running their businesses," said Michael Evans, managing director of JD Edwards South Africa. "Until now, IT managers have had to spend multiple times more on integration costs as they did to buy their application software in the first place whether they use a middleware infrastructure or not."
XBPs will be instrumental to the e-business software industry in realising its goal of facilitating rapid cost-effective application integration.
"JD Edwards continues to deliver tools and solutions that allow customers to focus on their everyday business problems," said Jack Maynard, Research Director Collaborative Enterprise Solutions, Aberdeen Group. "JD Edwards is once again demonstrating its commitment to addressing the real business needs of customers with its innovative and pragmatic leadership in the collaborative solutions space."
In the near future, JD Edwards plans to make its pre-determined XBPs available for business software applications from a wide variety of vendors enabling customers to choose the best-of-breed individual software products. XBPs are also scheduled to be available for self-service and supply-chain applications to deliver collaborative solutions tailored for vertical industries. For instance, JD Edwards will be able to deliver this multi-faceted product package to the high-tech electronics industry pre-integrated for the RosettaNet standard used widely in that space.
Pre-set XBP`s designed to integrate JD Edwards OneWorld software with e-procurement, CRM and storefront applications are available now. In addition, JD Edwards plans to offer consultant, maintenance and upgrade services for companies looking to build new XBPs that would tie in existing systems into the common XPI fold - legacy-based or otherwise.
This helps customers leverage investments already made with existing systems and will apply to systems they buy or acquire moving forward. Over time, the company`s library of pre-determined XBPs is anticipated to grow substantially to include XBPs that will connect across partner and competitor software vendors alike in an any-to-any commerce environment.
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