JD Edwards: История американской ERP-компании

Former American software company

J. D. Edwards World Solution Company or JD Edwards, abbreviated JDE, was an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company, whose namesake ERP system is still sold under ownership by Oracle Corporation. JDE's products included World for IBM AS/400 minicomputers (the users using a computer terminal or terminal emulator), OneWorld for their proprietary Configurable Network Computing architecture (a client–server fat client), and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (a web based thin client). The company was founded March 1977 in Denver, by Jack Thompson, C. T. P. "Chuck" Hintze, Dan Gregory, and C. Edward "Ed" McVaney. In June 2003, JD Edwards agreed to sell itself to PeopleSoft for $1.8 billion. Within days, Oracle launched a hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft sans JD Edwards. PeopleSoft went ahead with the JD Edwards acquisition anyway, and in 2005, Oracle Corporation finally took ownership of the combined JD Edwards PeopleSoft organization. As of 2020, Oracle continues to sell and actively support both ERP packages, branded now as JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World.

Ed McVaney originally trained as an engineer at the University of Nebraska, and in 1964 was employed by Western Electric, then by Peat Marwick, and moved to Denver, in 1968, and later became a partner at Alexander Grant where he hired Jack Thompson and Dan Gregory. Around that time he was realizing that, in his words, "The culture of a public accounting firm is the antithesis of developing software. The idea of spending time on something that you’re not getting paid for—software development—they just could not stomach that." McVaney felt that accounting clients did not understand what was required for software development, and decided to start his own firm. "JD Edwards" was founded in 1977 by Jack Thompson, Dan Gregory, and Ed McVaney; the company's name is drawn from the initials "J" for Jack, "D" for Dan, and "Edwards" for Ed. McVaney took a salary cut from $44,000 to $36,000 to ensure initial funding. Start up clients included McCoy Sales, a wholesale distribution company in Denver, and Cincinnati Milacron, a maker of machine tools. The business received a $75,000 contract to develop wholesale distribution system software and a $50,000 contract with the Colorado Highway Department to develop governmental and construction cost accounting systems. The first international client was Shell Oil Company. Shell Oil implemented JD Edwards in Canada and then in Cameroon. Gregory flew to Shell Oil in Douala, Cameroon to install the company's first international, multi national, multi currency client software system.

As the majority of JD Edwards's customers were medium sized companies, clients did not have large scale software implementations. There was a basic business need for all accounting to be tightly integrated. As McVaney would explain in 2002, integrated systems were created precisely because "you can’t go into a moderate sized company and just put in a payroll. You have to put in a payroll and job cost, general ledger, inventory, fixed assets and the whole thing. SAP had the same advantage that JD Edwards had because we worked on smaller companies, we were forced to see the whole broad picture." and by 2001, the company had more than 600 customers using OneWorld, a fourfold increase over 2000. The company became publicly listed on September 24, 1997, with vice president Doug Massingill being promoted to chief executive officer, at an initial price of $23 per share, trading on NASDAQ under the symbol JDEC. By 1998, JD Edwards' revenue was more than $934 million and McVaney decided to retire.

Within a year of the release of OneWorld, customers and industry analysts were discussing serious reliability, unpredictability and other bug related issues. In user group meetings, these issues were raised with JDE management. So serious were these major quality issues with OneWorld that customers began to raise the possibility of class action lawsuits, leading to McVaney's return from retirement as CEO. At an internal meeting in 2000, McVaney said he had decided to "wait however long it took to have OneWorld 100% reliable" and had thus delayed the release of a new version of OneWorld because he "wasn't going to let it go out on the street until it was ready for prime time." McVaney also encouraged customer feedback by supporting an independent JD Edwards user group called Quest International. After delaying the upgrade for one year and refusing all requests by marketing for what he felt was a premature release, in the fall of 2000 JD Edwards released version B7333, now rebranded as OneWorld Xe. Despite press skepticism, Xe proved to be the most stable release to date and went a long way toward restoring customer confidence. McVaney retired again in January 2002, although remaining a director, and Robert Dutkowsky from Teradyne was appointed as the new president and CEO.

After the release of Xe, the product began to go through more broad change and several new versions. A new web based client, in which the user accesses the JD Edwards software through their web browser, was introduced in 2001. This web based client was robust enough for customer use and was given application version number 8.10 in 2005. Initial issues with release 8.11 in 2005 lead to a quick service pack to version 8.11 SP1, salvaging the reputation of that product. By 2006, version 8.12 was announced. Throughout the application releases, new releases of system/foundation code called Tools Releases were announced, moving from Tools Release versions 8.94 to 8.95. Tools Release 8.96, along with the application's upgrade to version 8.12, saw the replacement of the older, often unstable proprietary object specifications (also called "specs") with a new XML based system, proving to be much more reliable. Tools Release 8.97 shipped a new web service layer allowing the JD Edwards software to communicate with third party systems.

In June 2003, the JD Edwards board agreed to an offer in which PeopleSoft, a former competitor of JD Edwards, would acquire JD Edwards. Support for the older releases such as the Xe product were to expire by 2013, spurring the acceptance of upgrades to newer application releases. By 2015, the latest offering of EnterpriseOne was application version 9.2, released October 2015. The latest version of World (now with a web based interface) was version A9.4, released in April 2015. Shortly after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft and JD Edwards in 2005, Oracle announced the development of a new product called Oracle Fusion Applications. Fusion was designed to co exist or replace JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and World, as well as Oracle E Business Applications Suite and other products acquired by Oracle, and was finally released in September 2010. Despite the release of Fusion apps, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and World is still sold and supported by Oracle and runs numerous businesses worldwide.