At the dinner table the other night one of my kids asked me, “Dad, what is it exactly that you do for your job?” To which my wife echoed, “Yeah, what do you do, exactly?” The answer isn’t a short one. I’m a product manager. My day is usually chopped into small slices of product planning, prioritizing features, writing requirements, talking with customers and partners, explaining things to field personnel, and dozens of other “interrupt-driven” activities. After fifteen minutes of explaining what I do each day the entire family was bewildered to boredom. So my son tried a different angle: “What’s the best thing about your job?” That one is easier to answer, straight and to the point: the best thing about my job is seeing our customers succeed using the products we build.
Take Arcturus Realty Corporation for example. They manage millions of square feet of real estate across Canada. They are putting JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle technology to good use to make their business run better. Their adoption of Oracle technology wasn’t so much a “Big Bang” as it is a step-by-step journey toward increasing return-on-investment. Back in 2001 their predecessor company started off like so many other JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers running JD Edwards OneWorld Xe on the IBM iSeries platform. Sound familiar? By 2006, in response to some market and economic turmoil (sound familiar?) Arcturus was given the mandate to drastically reduce their IT cost structure. As a short-term step, they migrated their JDE E1 implementation to x86 hardware running Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server. To save additional cost they also decided to let a partner, AITO Solutions Ltd., host their infrastructure. By 2007, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne’s adoption of Oracle technology was mature and mainstream, and the Oracle Technology Foundation licensing was very attractive. At that point Arcturus, as we say, “went Red Stack” by converting their entire JDE E1 infrastructure to Oracle technology, including Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database, and Oracle Internet Application Server. But that was just the beginning of the journey. John Chung, Arcturus’ VP of IT, has that enviable combination of technical aptitude and imagination. Before long he was drafting (quite literally on a cocktail napkin at Collaborate 2008!) plans to implement additional Oracle Fusion Middleware components, such as Oracle BPEL PM and Oracle BI Publisher, to streamline some burdensome business processes. From the plateau of a successful pilot project, John can see the panorama of possibilities for follow-on projects using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Now John is running out of cocktail napkins.
Who are some other JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers who are employing Oracle technology to meet their business challenges? Perhaps the best catalog of success stories is held in the proceedings from past conferences such as Oracle OpenWorld and Quest Collaborate. These are the customers who come forward to freely share their success stories with their peers. Some are simply using Oracle Database and Oracle Internet Application Server to satisfy basic JDE E1 infrastructure prerequisites. Others are reaching deeper into the Oracle Fusion Middleware portfolio, for example, leveraging Oracle SOA Suite components with JDE E1 Business Services to streamline integrations. I find it fascinating to peruse the conference archives to see just how innovative JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers can be. If you have an implementation of JDE E1 with Oracle Fusion Middleware, I encourage you to share your story with your peers at a local user group, a regional gathering, or one of our big annual events.
So, to all our customers who are already benefitting from using JD Edwards EnterpriseOne with underlying Oracle technology, thanks for making my job satisfying. And to all our customers who are in the process of implementing, or just contemplating using Oracle technology with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, thanks for giving me a reason to hurry into work tomorrow.
