As Published In May 2007

John Schiff: JD Edwards World

Integration is the cornerstone of Oracle's JD Edwards World A9.1, announced on January 31 in New York. Dubbed the Renaissance Release, this major upgrade of JD Edwards World delivers on Oracle's Applications Unlimited commitment to continuously provide customers with new functionality while at the same time enhancing their ability to seamlessly integrate the product into disparate IT environments. Oracle's Vice President and General Manager of JD Edwards World John Schiff, who has been a part of JD Edwards for much of its 30-year history, talked about JD Edwards World's continued commitment to providing customers with the same enterprise-level functionality available to the largest companies.

Currently: Vice president and general manager, Oracle's JD Edwards World Applications Prior to Oracle: IBM in South Africa and Rochester, Minnesota Education: Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Pretoria; years of on-the-job training, and the school of hard knocks

PROFIT: Why has this release of JD Edwards World been called the Renaissance Release?

SCHIFF: The term was really chosen by our customers. When they saw what we were doing, that was the name that they came up with. Customers told me that they felt the release was a real recommitment to the product line by Oracle. This is the first new release in 10 years—the first full-blown new release where we actually have added significant functionality in all areas. We were doing small, incremental enhancements via service packs or cumulative upgrades, but nothing of the scale that we've committed to under Oracle. Customers viewed this as the renaissance of the product, a commitment to providing additional value, helping customers move forward with a product.

PROFIT: JD Edwards is known for its focus on the small and medium business [SMB] sector, but the company's original focus was on the oil and gas industry, correct?

SCHIFF: We still have a lot of oil and gas customers using the product, but that's far from our sole focus. We have customers from every industry—manufacturing, engineering, real estate, and more. But if you think about the oil and gas industry in particular, there are many smaller exploration companies, and there are service companies around the larger companies, and then of course there are some very large companies that are still using the JD Edwards World software, alongside other products in far-flung parts of the world. It shows that JD Edwards World is being used both by SMBs and also by huge multinationals in the energy sector.

PROFIT: And of course the relationship with IBM is another key focus for the JD Edwards World product.

SCHIFF: Yes, that's a very unique part of our product line because we have only one hardware platform that we partner with. We have a very close alliance. I have a very good personal relationship with Mark Shearer, IBM's System i general manager. We'll sit down every six weeks and talk about what his objectives are and what we're doing. And we work together on customers—normally, if we're talking about customer issues, a customer may be thinking of an upgrade, needing reassurance that we're both committed to its future. So a customer might be saying, "I want to move forward on a particular hardware platform," or "I want to upgrade my JD Edwards software. Are you really serious about working with IBM?" We've done town hall meetings together, attended joint conference calls and analyst briefings together. This is a good example of that relationship: I got on a conference call with Mark and an analyst, and one of our customers got on—and of course 100 percent of our customers are on the IBM platform—and he was talking about how his cost of IT was .38 percent of his company's revenue. And the analyst said, "You mean 3.8 percent?" And he said, "No, 0.38 percent." But that's completely attributable to the combination of the low-cost IBM iSeries and the JD Edwards World line.

PROFIT: Can you talk more about how you've worked with customers on this release?

On Oracle Fusion John Schiff We're looking at some of the design points for Oracle Fusion and saying, "Where can we learn from what they're doing, and where can we leverage some of the ideas?" An example of that is our service-oriented architecture that we're adding in as a layer on top of our JD Edwards World applications. It gives our customers a taste of what's to come but also allows them to use that as a bridge to other Oracle Fusion applications.

SCHIFF: We have a very active JD Edwards World product user group. Quest is the overarching JD Edwards/PeopleSoft user group community and within that, we have the JD Edwards World product user group. They have been very loyal customers, first of all, but also very vocal about what they'd like to see in the product. We also have a nominated group called the JD Edwards World Strategy Council. That group has taken each of the priority lists and helped us identify the key factors that we want to put in, so that gave us an overall strategy. Then we took each of the individual areas and broke them down so that we could do something very similar at that level. Our customers came to us with their major business needs—product issues, but also interactions with Oracle from a service and sales contact point of view. It's important to them that we continue to highlight our commitment to the JD Edwards World customers.

PROFIT: As you've talked to customers about the upcoming release, what's the most common question you hear and how are you responding to it?

SCHIFF: Our most frequently asked question is usually, "Is this the last release?" and "How committed are you to Applications Unlimited? Is this for real?" And the answer is yes, we are committed to the product. Yes, we're putting out a release. Yes, we are continuing to gather requirements for the next release.

PROFIT: What's been the biggest influence on your job?

SCHIFF: Well, I get out to Oracle headquarters once a quarter for a GM [general managers] meeting. I'm out there probably once or twice a month to meet with other people. And the interesting part is seeing how different our product lines are, but how similar our issues are around business. And the level of cooperation that we have between the various general managers is extraordinary, so that's really an inspiration. Just listening to somebody else's problems gives me a heads-up that these same problems are probably coming my way, and I'm sure they feel the same way about some of the things that I have to deal with, so there's a tremendous spirit of cooperation between the GMs. And the man who heads up the applications development organization, [Senior Vice President of Applications Development] John Wookey, really communicates well with me and with all of our teams. This is important to our customers—they want to know how we connect at the higher level because so many of them have multiple products, and they're interested in their individual products as well as the overall vision and strategy.