Tier One Defined
By Lyle Ekdahl, Oracle JD Edwards Group Vice President and General Manager
I recently became aware of the latest Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing tactic. Wait now, what is Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing and what does that have to do with
ERP? Well if you grew up in USA during
the 50’s, 60’s and maybe a bit in the early 70’s there was a unifying media of
culture known as the comic book. I was a
big Iron Man fan. I always liked the troubled hero aspect of Tony Start and hey
he was a technologist. This is going
somewhere, just hold on. Of course comic
books like most media contained advertisements. Ninety pound weakling transformed by Charles Atlas in just 15 minutes
per day. Baby Ruth, Juicy Fruit Gum and
all assortments of Hostess goodies were on display. The best ad was for the “Amazing Live
Sea-Monkeys – The real live fun-pets you grow yourself!” These ads set the
standard for exaggeration and half-truth; “…they love attention…so eager to
please, they can even be trained…” The
cartoon picture on the ad is of a family of royal looking sea creatures –
daddy, mommy, son and little sis – sea monkey? There was a disclaimer at the bottom in fine print, “Caricatures shown
not intended to depict Artemia.” Ok what
ten years old knows what the heck artemia is? Well you grow up fast once you’ve been separated from your buck twenty
five plus postage just to discover that it is brine shrimp. Really dumb brine
shrimp that don’t take commands or do tricks.
Unfortunately the technology industry is full of sea monkey
sales and marketing. Yes believe it or
not in some cases there is subterfuge and obfuscation used to secure
contracts. Hey I get it; the picture on
the box might not be the actual size. Make up what you want about your product,
but here is what I don’t like, could you leave out the obvious falsity when it
comes to my product, especially the negative stuff. So here is the latest one – “Oracle’s JD
Edwards is NOT tier one”. Really? Definition please!
Well a whole host of googleable and reputable sources
confirm that a tier one vendor is large, well known, and enjoys national and
international recognition. Let me see
large, so thousands of customers? Oh and part of the world’s largest business
software and hardware corporation? Check
and check JD Edwards has that and that. Well known, enjoying national and
international recognition? Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is available in 21
languages and is directly localized in 33 countries that support some of the
world’s largest multinationals and many midsized domestic market
companies. Something on the order of half
the JD Edwards customer base is outside North America. My passport is on its third insert after 2
years and not from vacations. So if you
don’t mind I am going to mark national and international recognition in the got
it column. So what else is there? Well
let me offer a few criteria.
Longevity – The JD Edwards products benefit from 35+ years
of intellectual property development; through booms, busts, mergers and
acquisitions, we are still here
Vision & innovation – JD Edwards is the first full suite
ERP to run on the iPad as just one example
Proven track record of execution – Since becoming part of
Oracle, JD Edwards has released to the market over 20 deliverables including
major release, point releases, new apps modules, tool releases, integrations….
Solid, focused functionality with a flexible, interoperable,
extensible underlying architecture – JD Edwards offers solid core ERP with specialty modules for verticals all
delivered on a well defined independent tools layer that helps enable you to
scale your business without an ERP reimplementation
A continuation plan – Oracle’s JD Edwards offers our
customers a 6 year roadmap as well as interoperability with Oracle’s next
generation of applications
Oh I almost forgot that the expert sources agree on one
additional thing, tier one may be a preferred vendor that offers product and
services to you with appealing value. You should check out the TCO studies of JD Edwards. I think you will see what the thousands of
customers that rely on these products to run their businesses enjoy – that is
the tier one solution with the lowest TCO. Oh and if you get an offer to buy an ERP for no license charge, remember
the picture on the box might not be the actual size.
