Oracle confirms commitment to JD Edwards

Larry Ellison has pledged to support JD Edwards customers

Oracle used its UK JD Edwards Group event today to reaffirm a commitment by chief executive Larry Ellison that the vendor would continue supporting and enhancing its acquisition’s applications for a decade.

John Schiff, vice president and general manager of the JDE World applications unit, indicated that Oracle was “not in the business of doing end-of-life” and would not simply drop JDE’s applications at the end of 10 years if customers still wanted them.

He argued that Oracle would not “force” customers to migrate to the vendor’s new Fusion applications when they are released next year. Likewise, he is not anticipating a large swing towards Fusion adoption following the launch.

A migration path will be made available for interested parties, however, and Fusion applications will be integrated with JDE ones as appropriate to enable the customer base to exploit the new functionality.

The conference, which took place today and yesterday at the Twickenham Stadium in Middlesex, was attended by about 300 people.

The numbers pleased Ronan Miles, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group, who pointed out that attendance at most industry shows had fallen by between 15 and 20 per cent.

He was also “grateful” that high-profile Oracle executives had taken the time to travel to the UK to reaffirm the announcement made at OracleWorld US in October that they were “still in the JD Edwards game”.

“It’s a new message as there’s a degree of human commitment to it,” he said.