J.D. Edwards Has Eye On ISVs

The program aims to help J.D. Edwards forge ties with a group of vendor partners that until now did not fit into the company's other partner programs, said Minda Whiteman, director of marketing alliances at the Denver-based company.

ISVs that might currently have only one or two customers interested in using J.D. Edwards for its supply chain and ERP capabilities now can purchase J.D. Edwards software at a discount, Whiteman said.

ISVs would pay $20,000 for the J.D. Edwards product of their choice and training on that product. ISVs would then be able to write a closely integrated product with the J.D. Edwards software.

Solution providers could ostensibly benefit from the new arrangement, Whiteman said, since a wider variety of product integration "helps fill needs in the sales process," she said.

One J.D Edwards solution provider said that most ISVs interface to the large ERP packages, rather than integrate with them.

"The benefit [of such a program would be to get industry-specific ISVs to highly integrate to J.D. Edwards to extend their appeal in those industries," said Mike Hawksworth, president and CEO of MSS Technologies, a Phoenix-based solution provider.

MSS has worked with Scribe Software, Bedford, N.H., to aid the company in integrating its EAI software with J.D. Edwards technology, he said.

Chris Gloede, managing director of business development at Capita Technologies, King of Prussia, Pa., pointed out that product integration "can be as little as passing extremely high levels of data between one system and another, or as low-level as complete interaction between systems."

Integration "is never a walk in the park," said Gloede, a longtime J.D. Edwards partner and a member of Vantage, a four-month-old alliance of regional J.D. Edwards solution providers that teamed up to better compete with global consulting firms such as Accenture. He applauded J.D. Edwards' move.

"Encouraging a well-constructed integration provides for better end-user product almost 100 percent of the time," Gloede said.

J.D. Edwards' Whiteman said she expected some integrated offerings resulting from the new partner program to appear in the first quarter of 2003.