The 7th JD Edwards Summit  took place last week
(1st – 5th February) in Denver, and once more, it was a great opportunity for JD Edwards partners to hear about all the latest news and developments.

At the summit we have direct access to the JD Edwards product team, we get to learn, ask questions and give lots of feedback. This enables us to ensure we have all the latest information so that we can ensure that our clients continue to optimize their ERP investment.

It was a great week – enriching, informative and fun - even the Summit special guest, the snow did not miss the appointment, adding a really special touch to the event.

The theme this year was THRIVE 

T – Transform your business

Leverage new technologies and make your traditional business evolve towards new, innovative models:  keep moving!

Whether you follow the rules or change the game, there are plenty of opportunities out there for you if you set the right strategy

• As a traditional player, make sure that you play in niche areas where you can add value to your customers
• As a game changer, add a unique advantage to your products

H – Harness the Power of Alignment

As partners, our goal is to ensure we are fully aligned with our clients’ goals. What's great about the JD Edwards ecosystem is partners' willingess to work together to ensure the best possible result for our clients. This spirit of cooperation can be seen at Redfaire International  and in the events organised by local user groups, for example, the upcoming French User Day on March 24th.

 

R – Reach for new opportunities

Many catalysts in the form of new technologies are available to help you to develop new business models: Cloud, Mobile, Social and IoT are only few examples of exciting new avenues for growth. 

The Oracle JD Edwards product team know the importance of these developments for JDE clients and are actively investing in offering the best possible solutions.

For example, just this year we saw the release of the JD Edwards IoT Orchestrator and soon we will see the release of a Mobile Cloud Service for JD Edwards. The new solution, for mobile users only, will bundle on a subscription model Asset Maintenance and Field Service. Easy to consume and affordable, it will be available from 9.1 on. It will include licenses for Mobile Application Framework and provide great insight with Mobile Analytics.

I – Industry Focus

The strength of JD Edwards has always been its deep industry specialization and the JDE product team continues to build on over twenty years of research and development to ensure that JDE is the ERP that offers best in class vertical solutions. As well as focusing on its traditional target markets, CPG, Asset Intensive, Industrial Services, Manufacturing and Distribution, there are now more than 950 industries where JD Edwards and its partners can add value providing innovative solutions to specific business problems.

V – Value of Choice

Choice is important to our customers, and JD Edwards can support any model: on premise, private cloud, public cloud, hybrid. 

E – Engage with new ideas

Probably the key message of this conference was that innovation, at every level, is no longer a nice to have. What makes JDE great is that there has always been a real sense of community This strong sense of community really facilitates innovation, thanks to an openness to sharing and engaging with new ideas. The whole JDE ecosystem is committed to collecting input from multiple, even non-traditional, contributors and developing new products to create value and innovation.

What was clear throughout the Conference was the increasing number of features and tools available to the ecosystem (partners AND customers) to develop ideas beyond JDE Core Development. A great example of this is the idea of Citizen Developers.

Citizen Developers
The Citizen Developer has been at the heart of this Summit, the strategy is clearly to enable the ecosystem to extend JD Edwards solution at any level: Customization, Configuration or Personalization

Customization – increased level of standards based tools

• Java/JavaScript – ADF, JET, MAF
• .Net
•  PAAS – ABCS, MAX

Less dependencies on JD Edwards’s proprietary tools (RDA, FDA)

Configuration – decrease reliance on developers and take advantage of the business analysis skills providing increased level of configuration platforms

 

• Orchestration Studio
• Page Composer
• Café One
• Hover Forms
• One View
• Simplified (Kiosk) Mode

 

Personalization – let users personalize their own user experience: Saved Queries, Watch Lists, One View, Favorites, and Grid Formats.

From Personalization to Customization, four tools in particular, or their evolution, captured our attention:

• Page Composer – released with Tools 9.2.0.2, it allows to create E1 Pages simply and intuitively: Business flows, OVR, ADF applications, JDE applications, external URL can be combined to provide a superior user experience

• Orchestration Studio – the brand new released Orchestration Studio allows the business user to configure ad hoc orchestrations thanks to its user friendly and intuitive interface. Primarily dedicated to the IoT, its potential goes far beyond the Internet of Things Orchestrations.
  
  
• MAX – is the new Mobile Application Accelerator dedicated to the citizen developer, part of the Mobile Cloud Service offering. It allows you to build mobile applications without writing any code. MAX is a Web Browser based tool, it provides a library of ready-to-use tiles and widgets, as well as a full catalog of services at the disposal of the business user. The app can be seen while building it, no emulator is required. The business user can edit, test and publish its application directly from the browser.
  
  
  

 

• Application Interface Services (AIS) – The AIS Server provides a JSON over REST interface, which is a light-weight interface that AIS clients (including mobile enterprise applications, AIS Java API clients, and the Simplified Applications Framework) use to interact with EnterpriseOne applications and forms. For instance, the REST protocol is the preferred choice for IoT orchestrations, due to the nature of IoT device integration. The AIS Client Java API enables developers to create applications that communicate with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne AIS Server: it provides classes and methods that enable AIS clients to manage (create, read, update, delete) data in EnterpriseOne through REST services. In summary, lots of new capabilities and innovation for developers, simplification, more standards adoption and compatibilities (.Net) and an interesting roadmap :  what are you waiting for ?

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, the key message we took away from the summit is best summed up in a quote by renowned economist and thinker Alex Tabarrok: 

“The only way to thrive is to Innovate. It’s that simple”