J.D. Edwards' CEO Ed McVaney banks on collaborative commerce to drive business
AS THE CEO of J.D. Edwards, Ed McVaney is in the process of reinventing the company to become a leading player in the area of collaborative commerce. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, McVaney talks about his company's drive to create an anytime, anywhere infrastructure for e-business and the changing nature of supply-chain dynamics.
InfoWorld: Much of the history of J.D. Edwards is associated with the AS/400 platform and ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications. How is J.D. Edwards evolving?
McVaney: In terms of new sales, 50 percent of them are Unix or Windows NT and 50 percent are AS/400. I'd say we are still the guerilla in the AS/400 marketplace, but we have a very strong capability in Unix and Windows NT. Supply chain, meanwhile, is fundamentally important to any ERP business. The whole rest of our business is supply-chain execution. We bought Numetrix 18 months ago, and we've done a really first-class integration between their products and our products. That puts us strongly in supply-chain business. It's our key growth area.
InfoWorld: What's driving all the interest in supply chains?
McVaney: The thing that's driving it is just the economics. Something that's helping us a lot is that we have both the supply-chain execution side and the old ERP side. The whole thing is about inventory optimization and cost control and things of that nature.
InfoWorld: What impact has all the hype around digital marketplaces had on the supply-chain category?
McVaney: I would say they're different tools, in a sense devoted toward the same thing. I think the digital market thing has really subsided a lot in the last couple of months. And when you really think it through, it should. They're not much more than what a farmer's co-op is. Digital marketplaces are better ways of doing procurement, but we're finding an awful lot of businesses want to do private exchanges. I don't particularly like that phrase. Some people are saying that one peer to another peer is a private exchange. The difference is the basic supply chain as we used to know it was a little clunkier. What we're into now is very advanced business-to-business communications. Supply chain could have meant a couple of years ago simply using advanced mathematical techniques to optimize inventory, shop floor control, and transportation. Now we're really getting into collaborative supply chains where not only do I know what's going on inside my business but, because of b-to-b connectivity, I also know what's going on up and down the supply chain.
InfoWorld: How do you define collaborative supply chains?
McVaney: We believe that there has to be any-to-any connectivity. Exchanges are nice. But if WalMart asked me to connect up to them directly, I have to connect up to them; I can't go through an exchange. We
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
