APPLICATIONS UNLIMITED
THE EVOLUTION OF ENTERPRISEONE
JD EDWARDS GENERAL MANAGER LENLEY HENSARLING ON TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP,
PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT, AND WEB SERVICES INTEGRATION
utting innovation into the hands of
customers has always been part
of JD Edwards’ mission. Today,
more than 59 percent of customers
are running the most recent releases of
Oracle’s JD Edwards products, evidence
of their confidence in the evolution of this
product line. Lenley Hensarling, general
manager and vice president of JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne, talked with Profit about
product enhancements and how customers
are continuing to react to and benefit from
Oracle’s applications acquisition strategy.
PROFIT: Tell us about your current
development focus for JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne.
HENSARLING: Right now it’s threefold,
around total cost of ownership, performance enhancement, and integration with
Oracle Fusion Middleware Web services in
our tools infrastructure.
Let’s start with total cost of ownership.
In Release 8.97, we put a new capability
into the toolset that we call server manager.
This is a console that allows customers
to manage their JD Edwards implementation in one place, even if they have
multiple instances running. This will be
the foundation for delivering important
capabilities on Oracle Enterprise Manager
in the future, so we’re pretty excited about
this piece. In the area of performance
enhancement, we know that how fast a
screen renders rows of new information
and how crisply and quickly you can
navigate a screen really matter to customers. So we put improved functionality into
their hands as quickly as possible. And
then, probably the most important component of the 8.97 release was our work
integrating Oracle Fusion Middleware
Web services into our tools infrastructure. We built extensions to Oracle JD
Edwards JDeveloper that allow a customer
to develop Web services in Oracle Fusion
Middleware and have those services
managed by our JD Edwards lifecycle
management capabilities. That’s a big step
toward supporting Oracle Application
Integration Architecture. In the upcoming
tools release, Release 8.98, we will be
NEW AT ORACLE
CRM GOES BEYOND COST-CUTTING
Three planned new offerings—Oracle
Self-Service eBilling 6.0, Oracle’s Siebel
eCommerce 8. 1, and Siebel eService
8. 1—leverage Oracle’s massive investment
in both service-oriented architecture (SOA)
and Oracle Fusion Middleware to push
customer relationship management (CRM)
self-service beyond simple cost-cutting to
build more-profitable relationships.
By combining new features with
the agility of SOA and Oracle Fusion
Middleware, the planned offerings
provide three key elements of successful
self-service CRM initiatives: cross-channel
consistency, enhanced agility, and a high
degree of personalization.
“These next-generation products go way
beyond merely deflecting traffic from call
centers,” explains Mike Betzer, vice president, CRM product strategy, Oracle. “They
actually enhance the customer experience,
driving customer loyalty and also enabling
targeted cross-selling and up-selling.”
Oracle Self-Service Billing
No one likes to pay bills. But if you give
customers an experience that is both
seamless and highly personalized, you
can leverage that transaction to build
loyalty—and even drive new revenue.
“Everyone understands the savings
that paperless billing can deliver: fewer
agent-assisted transactions, reduced printing and postage, and accelerated collections, but Oracle Self-Service eBilling goes
the next step,” says Mike Betzer. “By presenting highly relevant content along with
bills, companies can drive Web traffic that
leads to increased brand loyalty, increased
adoption of other self-service capabilities,
and increased revenue.”
Siebel eCommerce 8. 1 and
Siebel eService 8. 1
Oracle’s new Siebel CRM Self-Service
offerings, capitalizing on years of
investment in SOA and Oracle Fusion
Middleware, extend companies’ CRM
systems to the Web channel, empowering customers to access real-time transaction histories—and also move seamlessly
between self service and assisted service.
At the same time, Oracle Fusion
Middleware makes it far easier to create
and change the user experience, thanks
to its visual, declarative, standards-based
development environment. For example,
sophisticated selling rules—including
pricing, eligibility, compatibility, and
configuration—can be managed once
within the Siebel CRM system and then
deployed anywhere.
“These new products pack a one-two
punch,” says Betzer. “Companies gain
both the agility to respond instantly to
changing market conditions and the
robust online commerce capabilities to
capitalize on them.”
PRIME YOURSELF FOR ORACLE E-BUSINESS
SUITE RELEASE 12
Major new releases of software products
can leave even the most-savvy business users in the dark. A new book, the
result of collaboration between consulting services provider
Solution Beacon,
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Advantage Partner, and
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User Group, can help
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highlights of Oracle
