Andrews Consulting

  Every time I do a posting that comments on the sad fate of AS/400 (aka iSeries, System i or Power Servers) many passionate responses come in.  Rather than respond to each one separately I will use this posting to expand on and clarify the previous one. First, I share your collective frustration with what has happened [...]

More than 15 years after it was “replaced” by OneWorld (now know as EnterpriseOne) the World version of JD Edwards is finally fading away.  The customer base has fallen to under 1,000 organizations worldwide and the rate of replacement is accelerating.  The surprise is not that this is happening but that it took this long [...]

OpenWorld provided a good feel for what seems to matter most to Oracle’s top management.  I can’t claim to be perfect at reading their minds, but there was an abundance of evidence available on which to base an opinion.  Safe in the knowledge that it won’t be 100% right (but confident that it is not [...]

The European Commission formally issued a Statement of Objections yesterday listing its reasons for not approving the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.  There was really only one – concern that Oracle would reduce support for the mySQL open source database management system and thereby reduce competition.  Oracle’s proprietary 11g DBMS is the market leader [...]

Lyle Ekdahl can be serious when he needs to be as the photo here demonstrates.  He also loves a good sight gag and punch line.  Ekdahl was the obvious choice to oversee Oracle’s JD Edwards franchise when Lenley Hensarling left this summer in terms of experience and knowledge of our market segment.  His selection was [...]

An informative session I attended at OpenWorld was the roadmap for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA).  I was only able to comment briefly on it in the October 22 posting.  This posting will expand on what I learned.  OBIA is the unpronounceable acronym Oracle has chosen for a family of products that it first inherited when [...]

The first complete update to EnterpriseOne Release 9.0 is now officially available.  It comes approximately one year after the introduction of 9.0.  A number of features and reports have been added but most of them will only appeal to a small subset of our community.  In general, improvements to the base JDE modules are becoming [...]

When IBM puts on a conference you can count on it to be well organized and informative.  Information On Demand (IOD) 2009 is following the classic IBM formula perfectly.  My only disappointment has been the lack of any dramatic news or the introduction of major new concepts.  Most of what I have heard so far [...]

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s horoscope for all of last week must have read “don’t leave the house”.  Perhaps the worst week during his tenure began Sunday night the 11th when Sun founder Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison kicked off OpenWorld with an all out assault on IBM.  The two of them were like [...]

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customer Reflexite Corporation of Avon Connecticut was one of 15 organizations that won Oracle’s “Enable the Eco-Enterprise” award at OpenWorld last week.  As the CEO of the firm that installed the software at Reflexite I had the honor of accepting the award on behalf of Reflixite, whose CIO was unable to attend. [...]

OpenWorld is over, but the full notebook I brought back will take weeks to put into postings.  This one will expand on the first glimpse of Fusion Applications provided by CEO Larry Ellison himself.  First the basic facts.  Fusion Applications is the first attempt by a major software vendor to create a complete suite of applications [...]

Oracle finds a way to make each OpenWorld conference quite different from all the others.  This year the huge crowds were gone and little that was unexpected or all that dramatic was formally announced.  At the same time it became crystal clear that when complete, the Sun Microsystems acquisition will propel Oracle into a very [...]

 Lyle Ekdahl (Oracle’s new JDE development executive) kicked off the JD Edwards specific sessions Monday morning.  Sadly, now that he has been promoted he can’t bring the zaniness to these presentations that once was his trademark.  The best he could do was pass out little bags of candy.  There was no big news to be shared, [...]

 Larry Ellison customarily takes the OpenWorld stage on Wednesday afternoon.  Sometimes to promote something minor (once it was a new support offering for Linux), and occasionally to break some much bigger news.  I just learned that tomorrow’s keynote will fall into the big news category.  Readers of this blog know I have been skeptical about [...]

Oracle co-presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz are frequently used to offset CEO Larry Ellison’s flamboyance with quiet competence.  The keynote they hosted Monday morning offered none of the passion, salesmanship or zany moments that the McNealy-Ellison show provided the night before.  Following a bland summary of the strategy Oracle has been pursuing in recent years [...]

With the Sun Microsystems acquisition still in approval limbo I thought Oracle might be careful about what was said at OpenWorld.  I didn’t count on having Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy appear for what might have been his last high profile speech with Larry Ellison then joining him on stage for what morphed into an [...]

Investment in improvement is one of the biggest casualties of the now year old economic crisis.  The mantra of too many decision makers has become “if it costs money, stop doing it”.  In more prosperous times IT departments had funding to invest in projects to carry out improvements that would pay off over time through [...]

Open World starts next Sunday and I will be there with so many different hats to wear I may need to pay extra for checked luggage.  My first goal will be to collect useful intelligence and you can count on numerous postings based on what I uncover.  A larger than usual number of JDE experts [...]

Romances between high profile celebrities never seem to last.  Might the same thing be true for alliances between giant technology businesses?  For nearly five years IBM and Oracle have enjoyed a strange and wonderful relationship.   Executives have been quite complementary of each other, have invited their counterparts to speak at each other’s major selling events, [...]

Cold Fusion  We live in times when good things to worry about range from “which steroid era players belong in the Hall of Fame?” to “can our species survive climate change?”  Given the range of real things to be concerned about, JD Edwards users do not need to spend any time worrying about Oracle Fusion [...]