J.D. Edwards Reveals E-Business Strategy

Ed McVaney, chairman and founder of enterprise software vendor J.D. Edwards & Co., today proclaimed that client-server technology is dead, and proceeded to usher in what he calls the new age of E-business at the company's annual user group conference in Denver.

"E-business is not a technology. It is an attitude and way of thinking," he says. "It is about new ways of going up and down the supply chain and collapsing space and time. It represents the biggest profound change." He says many companies to date have been reluctant to embrace E-business initiatives, mostly because they have been overly consumed with their year 2000 issues. But now that we are on the cusp of the millennium, he says E-business will flourish.

McVaney says J.D. Edwards will actively help its customers enter this new era. First, he introduced new Internet extensions for the company's core enterprise resource planning offering, including 62 new Web applications for employee self service, Internet storefronts, and data exchange between supply-chain partners. The company also announced a partnership with online procurement vendor Ariba Inc., whose product electronically links companies with their suppliers and helps them reduce the time and costs associated with purchasing office supplies, operating goods, and services. McVaney also talked about the company's acquisition yesterday of supply-chain management vendor Numetrix, whose latest product should foster cross-enterprise collaboration among multiple supply-chain partners, including suppliers, distributors, and customers.

McVaney also referenced the company's new ActivEra Portal, an E-business offering that the company will formally unveil tomorrow. From a single browser interface, users will have access to everything they need to do their jobs, including J.D. Edwards applications, urgent E-mail, to-do lists, spreadsheets, and data from the Internet such as stock quotes and weather.

"All rules of business have changed," McVaney says. "The key to success in the Information Age is the speed with which you can implement new ideas and organizing principles."