J.D. Edwards Taps Offshore Solution Provider for Client Projects

Based in Farmington Hills, Mich., Covansys has developers in Chennai, India, who since February have been participating in development of J.D. Edwards' software products. Now Covansys' development centers in India will also be working on development of solutions for clients, J.D. Edwards officials said.

In tandem with J.D. Edwards' internal consultants and channel partners, Convansys staff in India will work on development and maintenance of applications for the consulting group's and partners' clients. J.D. Edwards has about 120 consultants on its payroll.

J.D. Edwards officials said in February that the additional development capability would let it more speedily enhance and upgrade its flagship product suite, J.D. Edwards 5 and obviate the need for J.D. Edwards to hire its own foreign developers.

Observers said that developers in India, China, Russia and other countries provide top-notch development capabilities at one-half or one-third the cost of their Western counterparts.

In related news, Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday that it will offer this summer a hardware/software package centered around J.D. Edwards 5 and aimed at mid-sized companies.

HP ProLiant DL580 and DL380 servers, pre-populated with Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 database and J.D. Edwards 5 products, will be sold as a pre-configured offering called Customer Choice.

The package, slated to ship in August, is optimized for five to 150 concurrent users of J.D. Edwards' ERP products. Another version of Customer Choice that wraps in IBM's DB2 database will ship later in the year.

According to HP, some 60 percent of J.D. Edwards' customers on the Wintel platform also use ProLiant servers.