Before Oracle OpenWorld last September I invited readers of this post to meet me in person there.  That led to a number of meetings and new friendships.  For me, Collaborate is the best chance I have each year to find out what is really happening within organizations that use JDE as well as to learn [...]

Oracle has been working on a major upgrade to its Business Intelligence product line for almost four years.  We were told at Open World that the result would be called BI 11g and would arrive in 2010.  Oracle does not like to introduce anything near the end of its fiscal year that finishes at the [...]

One of the indirect consequences or Oracle’s Sun acquisition is that another sales rep with an Oracle business card may come calling on JDE accounts. Most of you just got used to seeing two reps – one for application products including JDE and one for technology products such as Red Stack middleware and database products.
Oracle [...]

For the 40 years ending the 1990’s it was a big deal whenever IBM introduced new hardware.  These days, hardware announcements from any vendor rarely get much mindshare.  This is partly because new generations of faster, smaller, cheaper, more efficient machines appear predictably every two years or less. 
The new IBM Power 7 series does everything [...]

For Oracle, 2010 is off to a nice start.  The same cannot be said for its arch enemy SAP whose CEO Leo Apotheker was just pushed out by its board following four consecutive declines in quarterly sales and a dramatic decrease in customer satisfaction.  The worldwide recession was a major contributor to SAP’s troubles as [...]

It is commonplace for JDE customers to use only a fraction of available capability – sometimes because specific features do not fit the needs of a particular user.  More often, a capability is not used because it is not understood or is hard to implement.  This seems to be the case with the imbedded finance, [...]

As the reality of Oracle’s Sun acquisition sinks in a number of intriguing thoughts come to mind.  The first is a déjà vu feeling that Oracle is trying to re-invent the AS/400.  Let me explain.  Oracle’s stated case for buying Sun is to become the “first” IT vendor to offer a highly integrated and optimized [...]

 Oracle’s “Applications Strategy Update” is a series of presentations scheduled around the world in the coming months.   A better name for the series might be “Topics of local interest to some of Oracle applications customers”.  Each meeting seems very narrowly targeted such as the dinner event last week in Seattle that focused on Insurance.  A [...]

The winter of Larry Ellison’s discontent is now made glorious summer by this Union of Europeans – or in modern English (not my badly twisted Shakespearian quote): the European Union (EU) has finally officially approved the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. 
Those wanting to hear the king’s own interpretation of what this means can tune into [...]

A deal with the European Union (EU) that will allow Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems seems to now be in place.  Formal approval could come any time now.  Oracle put on a full court press by having a large number of its largest European customers tell the EU that the deal was good for them.  [...]

During 2009 the JDE community had the opportunity to attend around a dozen different events including Collaborate, Oracle OpenWorld, regional Quest events and local user group meetings.  In virtually all of them attendance was down versus previous comparable events. My company was one a small number of organizations that participated in all of them.  We [...]

Next week we will reach the point when days finally stop becoming shorter.  Since the era when our ancestors lived in caves this has been a time of year to abandon pessimism and to celebrate the coming of better times.  No time in my 40+ year career has been as frustrating as 2009, a year [...]

At OpenWorld Oracle executives promoting Business Intelligence pushed the notion that there is a huge pent up demand for pre-built analytic applications.  That may be true, but as my company calls on JDE customers we find that Oracle is making an underlying assumption that may not yet be valid.  That assumption is that the executives [...]

2009 has been a difficult year on many levels for both individuals and businesses.  From a personal point of view I am glad that it is almost over.  My business could actually finish the year with higher revenues than in 2008 but making that happen has involved much hard work and some good fortune.  Continuing [...]

 
Every time I do a posting that comments on the sad fate of AS/400 (aka iSeries, System i or Power Servers) many passionate responses come in.  Rather than respond to each one separately I will use this posting to expand on and clarify the previous one.
First, I share your collective frustration with what has happened [...]

More than 15 years after it was “replaced” by OneWorld (now know as EnterpriseOne) the World version of JD Edwards is finally fading away.  The customer base has fallen to under 1,000 organizations worldwide and the rate of replacement is accelerating.  The surprise is not that this is happening but that it took this long [...]

OpenWorld provided a good feel for what seems to matter most to Oracle’s top management.  I can’t claim to be perfect at reading their minds, but there was an abundance of evidence available on which to base an opinion.  Safe in the knowledge that it won’t be 100% right (but confident that it is not [...]

The European Commission formally issued a Statement of Objections yesterday listing its reasons for not approving the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.  There was really only one – concern that Oracle would reduce support for the mySQL open source database management system and thereby reduce competition.  Oracle’s proprietary 11g DBMS is the market leader [...]

Lyle Ekdahl can be serious when he needs to be as the photo here demonstrates.  He also loves a good sight gag and punch line.  Ekdahl was the obvious choice to oversee Oracle’s JD Edwards franchise when Lenley Hensarling left this summer in terms of experience and knowledge of our market segment.  His selection was [...]

An informative session I attended at OpenWorld was the roadmap for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA).  I was only able to comment briefly on it in the October 22 posting.  This posting will expand on what I learned. 
OBIA is the unpronounceable acronym Oracle has chosen for a family of products that it first inherited when [...]

The first complete update to EnterpriseOne Release 9.0 is now officially available.  It comes approximately one year after the introduction of 9.0.  A number of features and reports have been added but most of them will only appeal to a small subset of our community.  In general, improvements to the base JDE modules are becoming [...]

When IBM puts on a conference you can count on it to be well organized and informative.  Information On Demand (IOD) 2009 is following the classic IBM formula perfectly.  My only disappointment has been the lack of any dramatic news or the introduction of major new concepts.  Most of what I have heard so far [...]

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s horoscope for all of last week must have read “don’t leave the house”.  Perhaps the worst week during his tenure began Sunday night the 11th when Sun founder Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison kicked off OpenWorld with an all out assault on IBM.  The two of them were like [...]

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customer Reflexite Corporation of Avon Connecticut was one of 15 organizations that won Oracle’s “Enable the Eco-Enterprise” award at OpenWorld last week.  As the CEO of the firm that installed the software at Reflexite I had the honor of accepting the award on behalf of Reflixite, whose CIO was unable to attend. [...]

OpenWorld is over, but the full notebook I brought back will take weeks to put into postings.  This one will expand on the first glimpse of Fusion Applications provided by CEO Larry Ellison himself.  First the basic facts. 
Fusion Applications is the first attempt by a major software vendor to create a complete suite of applications [...]

Oracle finds a way to make each OpenWorld conference quite different from all the others.  This year the huge crowds were gone and little that was unexpected or all that dramatic was formally announced.  At the same time it became crystal clear that when complete, the Sun Microsystems acquisition will propel Oracle into a very [...]

 Lyle Ekdahl (Oracle’s new JDE development executive) kicked off the JD Edwards specific sessions Monday morning.  Sadly, now that he has been promoted he can’t bring the zaniness to these presentations that once was his trademark.  The best he could do was pass out little bags of candy.  There was no big news to be shared, [...]

 Larry Ellison customarily takes the OpenWorld stage on Wednesday afternoon.  Sometimes to promote something minor (once it was a new support offering for Linux), and occasionally to break some much bigger news.  I just learned that tomorrow’s keynote will fall into the big news category.  Readers of this blog know I have been skeptical about [...]

Oracle co-presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz are frequently used to offset CEO Larry Ellison’s flamboyance with quiet competence.  The keynote they hosted Monday morning offered none of the passion, salesmanship or zany moments that the McNealy-Ellison show provided the night before. 
Following a bland summary of the strategy Oracle has been pursuing in recent years [...]