Denver-based J.D. Edwards & Co. will standardize its J.D. Edwards 5 collaborative business platform on IBM Corp.’s infrastructure technology, the companies announced Thursday.
Running J.D. Edwards 5 on IBM’s open middleware products – DB2, and WebSphere application server and portal with Tivoli security capabilities – will allow mid-market customers to develop and implement solutions for managing enterprise business processes, customer relationships, their supply chains and other business-to-business collaboration processes across different computing platforms, J.D. Edwards said.
J.D. Edwards 5 includes: Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Supplier Relationship Management, and Business Intelligence.
J.D. Edwards said the applications will be pre-integrated with IBM’s WebSphere
Application Server and Portal with embedded security, Lotus collaboration tools, and DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB).
The partnership gives JDE the “one-stop” solution mid-market customers are looking for, said J.D.Edwards President and CEO Bob Dutkowsky.
“This combination creates…(a) pre-integrated package of applications and infrastructure technology based on open, industry-standard technologies. It provides customers lower total cost-of-ownership over time than any competitive offering and sets the standard for ease-of-use, including rapid implementation, easier integration and maintenance, and easy, portal-based accessibility to end users,” Dutkowski said during a teleconference on Thursday.
“Today’s agreement underscores our customers’ demand for open software that will run across a variety of computing systems – unlike other proprietary approaches,” said Steve Mills, senior vice-president and group executive, IBM Software.
The companies said that the joint package will run on all vendor technologies that J.D. Edwards currently supports including Microsoft Windows and UNIX environments from IBM, HP, Sun and Unisys, and the IBM eServer iSeries, adding that J.D. Edwards will continue to offer customers integration and interoperability via its XPIT (eXtended Process Integration) solution using webMethods technologies.
J.D. Edwards and IBM will share sales leads and develop joint marketing programs in support of the integrated software and infrastructure technology package, with J.D. Edwards delivering it in phases beginning in early 2003, the companies said.
