Infocus and Summit–what did I learn?

Firstly it was great to see so many familiar faces, and meet some new people.  I had a number of people come and say hi at the conference and said thanks for blogging – that may have been my favourite part of the conference, for the people that did come and say hi – I say thanks!

Infocus is a quest run customer event, specific for JD Edwards clients and partners.   This was followed by a 2 day partner conference, known as summit.  Both conferences were in Denver Colorado, who spoilt attendees with 30 degree (celsius) days with 0 humidity.

I must admit that when I went into the conference, I was worried.  I was a little worried about investing strategically into JD Edwards.  My thoughts were somewhat reiterated when I did not hear about any huge announcements.  But, then I heard Lyle at summit (a lot of clients will not hear this), and I was once again excited about what was to come.  I don’t know what specifically Lyle did say to change my opinion, but it was made up of the following:

• Acknowledgement of the formation of a specific sales team at oracle that are rewarded and driven to sell JDE – cool
• Premiere support of JD Edwards 9.2 to at least 2030 – amazing!
• That NetSuite and cloud ERP are going to be the dominant SaaS offerings, but there is a lot of whitespace between these two products
• Lyle showed passion for JD Edwards and wanting to “protect his turf” when it came to SaaS sales trying to take away the JDE opportunities
• reiteration of what JDE is and what it can do for an organisation -
• awesome integration is easy now with AIS –> orchestration
• awesome integration with Cafe1
• useability through the roof with all of the UDO’s that are supporting citizen development
• Remember that ERP’s (especially mature ones) are going to create sales orders, track stock and do all of the basic transactions that you need.  JD Edwards especially is a mature product that will do ALL of these things easily.  Now you need to look at how you are going to augment this base functionality.  You’ll do that by embracing all mega-trends – vis-a-vis this diagram:

In this diagram I’ve tried to show that JD Edwards is awesome and does what it is told.  Great security, great database, stable, single source of truth.  As clients we need to respect master data and expose JDE securely using great integration (AIS / Orchestration) to enable amazing technology to be used and consumed side by side with your ERP.  You do not need to wait for AI enabled ERP – you can have it today!

This is being put into action today,

• Fusion5 are already using AI to interpret images attached to media objects and indexing and reporting on these.  This is a SIMPLE integration that can be plugged into any public cloud ERP implementation.  And this is just the beginning.
• Fusion5 are integrating IOT devices and raising work orders when things get too hot or too humid – this is being done today.
• Any many more examples of using the strength of your core ERP – but being innovative about hooking into new technology.

But, how can everyone do this? I personally think that you need 3 capabilities to deliver continuous innovation.

Both summit and infocus reiterated the need for all clients to get to 9.2 and start to embrace configuration not code.  reduce your technical debt by retiring modifications, which will allow you to embrace continuous innovation.

Get a partner to help your (like fusion5) adopt continuous innovation, but keeping you code current.  Fusion5 have CD3 (continuous development, continuous deployment, continuous delivery) which allows continuous innovation.  It’s important to start to get economies of scale by getting a partner to help you stay code current and allow you to focus on business while we take are of the platform.

If you are looking for ways that you can reinvigorate your JD Edwards and your passion for innovation, think about having a hackathon, or perhaps an innovation bootcamp.  We run these internally and for clients and they are a great way of coming up with ideas that could make a difference to your business or perhaps change an industry.

I attended a couple of great interactive sessions on 1 click provisioning and 64bit JD Edwards – two things that are going to affect you and your JD Edwards installation positively.  I also attended a great session on containers and JDE, if you are not looking into this technology (as I have said before) you should be.  This is going to change the way we think about large systems.

9.2.3 is going to contain some great enhancements (especially in orchestration) and you should look closely for the next large oracle conference (Open World?) for this to be announced.

My summary

What it lacked in large announcements, it made up for in core messaging and core product acknowledgment.  Embrace continuous delivery and find a partner to help you.  Embrace innovation and find a partner to help you.  JD Edwards is here for the long haul, use it’s strengths and augment and extend to the cloud – pugging in AI, ML and other megatrends to improve your decision making capabilities.  Configure your ERP, don’t modify it.