My own trumpet

Its news that is too good for me to keep quiet about. I have been running with an opportunity at a company in SA that makes steel pipes – we started talking in April, and did a small business process review project for them in May-July. From that BP review, we proposed a SYSPRO re-implementation together with a manufacturing integration component, our project manufacturing solution and some customised software. It was the largest proposal I have ever worked on in terms of software and services revenue. 

The company financial director called me to say our proposal has been accepted, in full!

Commenting on the win, a friend in the civil engineering field said that now I could take a Christmas break in relaxed confidence … as I would only have to worry about getting resources for the project after the new year.

What future for legacy ERP apps?

What I mean by legacy ERP are older ERP applications that were acquired by companies like Oracle and Infor. As a former employee of one of the older, I am interested in the JD Edwards (JDE) solution that Oracle acquired a few years ago.

Responding to a comment I sent him about the Oracle user conference, a contact at a long-time JDE client in South Africa, said:

Like most other companies, the rather messy Oracle world environment led our company to rather look at a SAP migration – its not planned locally for another 5 years, thus we still run JDE – but World version! [ed: the AS/400 green screen version]    Needless to say, Ifusion and other developments are really not applicable to us – I do stay in touch with Oracle though, but primarily about Oracle retail – eg Retek. We don’t run it, but all the major SA retailers do, and it’s a good occasion to meet with my peers in retail. The JDE world has shrunk smaller and smaller through the years…

I wonder how many JDE customers are just hanging on until they have budget, time and justification to change? So, is Oracle flushing money away by building its ifusion architecture to try to keep its legacy ERP customers? It seems Oracle would do better to invest in its vertical solutions (like Retek) and stabilise its legacy products so that it can milk those customers for as long as possible without having to spend too much on new development.

Also, if I was a JDE consultant/developer/specialist I would start looking at training and certification on other ERP apps – probably SAP, a Microsoft Dynamics product (but not Axapta), or SYSPRO.