Event Summary
"DENVER, Dec. 14, 1999 - J.D. Edwards & Company (NASDAQ: JDEC), the leading
supplier of agile software solutions for E-Business announced today its support
for FRx Software Corporation's new initiatives designed to broaden its position
as a premier supplier of financial reporting software. J.D. Edwards' enterprise
business software coupled with FRx's financial reporting solutions enable corporate
finance professionals to more easily access, analyze and distribute financial
data throughout the enterprise for more informed decision making.
J.D. Edwards' business software and the FRx products integrate financial data
from multiple sources and enable access, consolidation, reporting, analysis
and distribution of financial information across the enterprise, for use by
corporate finance professionals. FRx products provide financial report distribution
capabilities via email and the Internet and instant on-line analytical processing
(OLAP) to analyze and chart financial data. Also, using the standard XML format
with FRx products and J.D. Edwards' applications, financial reports can be processed
via the Internet, which eliminates global barriers and results in greater efficiency
and improved information sharing."
"FRx
enhances the significant investment customers have made in their J.D. Edwards
systems," said Robert Rohan, vice president of strategic alliances at FRx Software
Corp. "Corporate financial executives can continue to unleash the value of the
data stored in the J.D. Edwards system by using FRx to combine it with other
financial data from across the enterprise and to perform rich reporting and
analysis. The result is strategic knowledge that has a major impact on a company's
decision-making capability."
Market
Impact
This is the latest salvo in major ERP vendor attempts to make it easier for
customers to access detailed transactional data, one of the greatest ERP functional
and architectural challenges. Companies realize they have a wealth of valuable
information in their ERP databases, and have had no way to access or consolidate
it with other transactional systems. This makes any vendor announcement in this
space a competitive sales opportunity. However, J.D. Edward's approach seems
to be to gather all the data from the distinct datasources through the FRx reporting
engine, rather than to build a data warehouse. The warehouse approach would
be a more efficient use of network and CPU resources over time, and is the approach
taken by other vendors such as SAP and PeopleSoft. In addition, building OLAP
cubes on the fly is very resource intensive. The upside is that the data is
completely current as of the time the report is run. Sales representatives for
the various ERP vendors will argue long and hard as to which approach is better.
User
Recommendations
Customers investigating ERP solutions should include J.D. Edwards on their selection
list. However, the vendor should be closely questioned as to exactly what mechanics
FRx Software is using for data access, and how tightly the two products are
integrated. Potential customers should make sure to involve their database and
network administrators in the discussions.