Oracle has once again declared that customers' investments in its i-centric JD Edwards ERP solutions will be safe for years to come.

Last month, Oracle boss Larry Ellison said that his corporation will continue to develop the EntepriseOne and World applications it acquired when it bought PeopleSoft in 2005 for at least a decade. And with the UK JDE user group conference held at Twickenham Stadium a couple of weeks ago attracting around 300 delegates, it seems that the ERP platforms' ecosystem remains strong.

Oracle refuses to say just how many JDE customers it has in the UK, but it will say that that around 40% of its cross-platform EnterpriseOne users are running on the Power i and as JD Edwards World is i-only, the event's attendance figures perhaps speak for themselves.

Although Big Blue and Oracle may kick lumps out of each other publicly, they apparently play together quite happily in the JDE space. John Schiff, vice president and general manager of the JD Edwards World product line, points out that there were speakers from IBM Rochester, home of the Power i, at the UK user event and that Oracle is fully engaged with its IBM midrange customers.

"It’s a very open relationship and it’s not something we have to invent," says Schiff. "We invigorated something which existed for years and we plan to continue to nurture that relationship as we go forward. From a development perspective, we have a development centre in Denver that has a complementary centre from IBM co-located in the same building. We have at least monthly contacts between our two development organisations. We have executive calls and conferences at least on a quarterly basis, understanding our joint strategies, so it’s a very synergistic relationship that we have."

Schiff point out that Oracle has continuously updated World and Enterprise One with new versions of both in the last 12 months and numerous updates to their accompanying toolsets. Globally, 70% of its JDE install base is running within the last three releases of the applications. According the Schiff, Oracle even gets brand new customers for World which the corporation itself refers to as a "legacy" application.

Larry Ellison's occasional war of words with IBM will, of course, take on a rather different aspect with Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Whether its users like it or not, the i is already sucked into the battle over Unix market share. IBM i runs on Power Systems, the majority of which run AIX. This is fine when customers are happily running Oracle apps on AIX-driven iron. But as such systems compete toe-to-toe with their Solaris-driven counterparts, isn't there a danger that products like JDE will suffer in the cross-fire in a heightened battle between IBM and Oracle?

Due to the sensitive nature of the Sun purchase, Schiff can offer little comment save to say: "The customer really determines what we’re going to do and one of my biggest partners in installation is IBM. One of Oracle's biggest competitors on database is IBM, so, you know, we’re both partner and we’re competitors and that will continue going forward."

However, Ronan Miles, chairman of the independent UK Oracle Users Group (UKOUG) which has taken the UK JD Edwards User Group under its wing, is under no such stricture. In fact, the UKOUG is "very supportive" of Oracle’s plans to acquire Sun.

Miles says: "Our real interest here is Java, actually, and we also have a significant interest in our members who’ve got investment in Sun hardware given what is happening to Sun and given what people have spent on their hardware. But from the UKOUG’s viewpoint, we would not see a Sun acquisition being detrimental to any member’s existing investment or potential future investments in anybody else’s hardware like IBM."

Referring to the gauntlet thrown down by Oracle's Ellison who has offered a $10 million prize to any organisation that finds Oracle’s database software doesn’t run at least twice as fast on Sun servers as it does on IBM’s fastest hardware, he says:

"It’s great for Larry to print his x million dollar challenge and it makes for wonderful press coverage and everything else but there’s no way on god’s earth Oracle is going to risk the customer investment that has been made and will be made on IBM platforms. So from UKOUG’s viewpoint, we’re pretty darn assured that our existing customer base will continue to get great value out of their investment in Oracle technologies on non-Sun hardware.

"If we felt anything different we would be shouting that from the rooftops because, at the end of the day, we figure that the Sun hardware investment is about 20% of our membership’s investment in hardware. The other 80% is elsewhere. So we’re confident about the Oracle acquisition and we’re very positive about it for a variety of reasons. We do not for one second fear for our members investment in other suppliers."

Schiff rebuffs any suggestion that the JDE people within Oracle keep their heads down and quietly go about their business to avoid the flak that flies around in the corporation's battles with its competitors.

"It's not heads down," he says. "We’re represented at the highest level. The corporation knows what we’re doing. They are fully supportive."

Schiff points out that at its OpenWorld San Francisco conference last month, the first product that Oracle president Charles Philips talked about in his opening keynote speech was JD Edwards.

He says: "Do we continue to invest in the product? Absolutely. Do we continue to deliver value for our customers? Absolutely. Oracle is a very diverse company. We look at a very large customer base so as we’ve made many acquisitions, we continue to look to how we best conserve those customer bases in the best way we can."

Miles agrees with this analysis and thinks that one of Oracle’s strengths is preserving the value of the companies it buys.

"If you have a look at the intellectual property that Oracle acquires, then those folk are in a significant number of senior positions within Oracle," he says. "A lot of the leadership team is actually from acquisition rather than organically from Oracle and, similarly, when you have a look at the way that customers are supported through the course of an acquisition and subsequently, then Oracle really does very well at that and much better than a number of competitors that you could mention.

"I would challenge the 'heads down' thing because I think the JD Edwards folk in Oracle have developed the product because Oracle knows the right thing to do is to preserve the customer’s investment. And when you think about it, given Oracle’s 59 acquisitions to date have all been very profitable, healthy enterprises where you can get economies of scale out of squeezing the back office, you’ve got no real imperative to try and prune out the engineering, product development and product support. Because it’s already making good margin and through efficiencies in back office stuff you can grow that margin, why do you want to risk it? You don’t do you?"

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