JDe.Sourcing Denies Premature Demise

JDe.Sourcing, the ASP division of ERP software vendor JD Edwards, was busy denying a premature report of its closure today.

Leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor JD Edwards announced a restructure yesterday, along with the loss of 800 jobs worldwide. But despite a report in online technology journal Infoworld.com that it was due to be closed down, officials from JDe.Sourcing were hurriedly drafting a statement this morning to make clear that its future remains assured.

“We continue as commissioned, and as originally announced,” Gayle Sheppard told ASP-news in an exclusive briefing this morning.

The restructure comes six weeks after JD Edwards founder Ed McVaney returned from semi-retirement to replace departing president and CEO Doug Massingill. “He wanted the company to be going in a different direction than we were,” said corporate communications director John Sawyer this morning.

Signalling a crackdown on what he described as “ill-conceived” spending, McVaney made a point of noting that loss-making offices in Germany and Japan would be particularly hard hit by lay-offs.

But McVaney is committed to carrying on with JD Edwards’ ASP strategy, said Sheppard. “Ed has always been a strong supporter of the ASP business,” she said. McVaney was one of the instigators of early pilots of the ASP model by some of JDE’s channel partners, which began in 1997 (see ASP News Review extract, IBM’s application rental journey: JD Edwards – November 1998).

By comparison, JDe.Sourcing is a recent innovation, having launched in January this year to manage the ASP partner channel as well as providing ASP service direct to selected customers (see related ASPnews.com story, JD Edwards becomes an ASP – Jan 6th, 2000).

Only yesterday, said Sheppard, JDe.Sourcing had signed the company’s eighteenth ASP partner, a specialist provider serving the Chinese plastics industry. Last month, its first direct customer went live. “We’re doing very well. We have a lot of customers on the partner side, we have a lot of customers on the direct side,” she said.

When McVaney had said on a conference call yesterday, “”hat’s not our business; not our cup of tea,” he had been referring to the creation and hosting of digital marketplaces rather than the broader ASP business, she explained.

A growing number of JD.eSourcing’s direct customers are enterprises that want to deliver ASP services themselves, a shift that will help minimise channel conflict with JDE’s own partners, she added. “One of the things I’ve focussed on is helping customers who are channel masters to provide ASP services to partners in their channels,” she said.

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