By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
5/5/2009
The world of Tier-1 retail ERP is small. I'll get angry emails for sure, but while there are others that can play at this level, when I think Tier-1 retail ERP, I think SAP, Oracle, and JDA. I've already said something about SAP and Oracle in the last year, and now it's only fair to give JDA equal opportunity, so to speak. That's why last week I went to Focus, JDA's user group conference. I must confess bewilderment when it comes to JDA, and I was hoping that hanging out with their user community would help sort me out.
Here's what bewilders me. I haven't heard very much from JDA over my analyst years. Now, to be fair, they may have been spending an inordinate amount of focus on conveying their platform strategy to the market and I missed it. I'm not being disingenuous here. I moved around a bit during the time that might have happened, and I could have missed it. Which is why I was at Focus last week.
So, hoping to learn more about JDA, here's what I saw. One, customers who were very engaged in learning from each other. There was far less emphasis on what "the system" could do or how it worked, and much more emphasis on a given retailer's process and how they had adapted the system to their specific process. I saw camaraderie and pretty free-flowing information sharing. If there was worry about JDA's future or capabilities, I didn't see it. That was very encouraging.
But the second thing I saw was puzzling. In JDA's messaging to its customers, there was heavy emphasis on integrated systems. The product footprint did not contain the word "Manugistics" on it anywhere (though "E3" and "MMS" were there). Instead, there was "JDA Enterprise Architecture" and "JDA Integrator" (the latter presented as a temporary nuisance until full integration could be achieved) and then a bunch of modules. At the demo stations in the exhibit hall, no matter which area I looked at, you could see the ties back into the other areas of the product, or at a minimum the beginnings of what will eventually be much stronger ties. For example, there is indeed a single forecast of demand, and it is leveraged across all the other JDA products. So if you're in store ops creating a labor budget, you're using the same base sales forecast that a counterpart in merchandising is using for their category plan. Promotions created by a planner get folded back into the forecast, become inputs in a space planner's workbench, and eventually will also become tasks for a store associate. That seems pretty integrated to me, whether it's delivered through web services or through baling wire and chewing gum.
But then there were the customer presentations, and the conversations during breaks. One presenter, a retailer, touted very heavily the value of integration in the products he used, even stating that it was a major decision factor for him. A little later I asked him if he was using that integration, and he said, "No, we don't need to manage our business to that level of granularity, so we're not using that capability." What? And while granted, some names are really tough to kill, especially for a company with products that have been around as long as some of the products in JDA's portfolio, I heard way too many questions like, "Is that in Manu or E3?,” as people tried to put what they saw into the context of how they view JDA's portfolio. I also ended up in a discussion more than once over JDA's decision to abandon .Net in favor of the Manu platform, which is Java-based, and confusion, if not outright skepticism, over the idea of a "JDA Enterprise Architecture.” That doesn't sound integrated to me at all.
The third thing I saw was a tendency by both customer and JDA'er to make hyperbolic claims about the products and about JDA's competition. Now, I know this is a contentious space. There are only so many tier-1 retail deals to be had, and many more than the three I've named here will fight to the bitter end to win a deal of any size against any of the others. And JDA is by far not the only one to make these kinds of claims. But there is a kind of desperate gleam in the eye of the speaker every time they make one of these claims, which are either based on ridiculously old competitive information, or smack of toeing the company line without a real understanding of what they're saying or why they're saying it. I'm not sure what to make of it, except that it feels Shakespearean: the vendor doth protest too much.
When I wrap all these things together, I'm still left with a puzzle I haven't figured out, the puzzle of JDA. Are they like SAP, a vendor that has embraced the worst criticisms leveled against them and is working furiously to overcome them - one that now is fighting more against its past reputation than reality? Or are they like Oracle, a vendor that purchased a number of technologies and still seems to be folding them in? When it comes to supply chain and merchandise planning, JDA really seems to have their ducks in a row. I'm a little fuzzy on their cross-channel strategy, and on the role execution plays in their view of the world, and I'm way fuzzy on their plans to string all this together in a way that reduces the integration burden of their customers. But just as soon as I'm ready to buy in, someone says something utterly ridiculous about their competition, and it destroys their credibility.
Ultimately, JDA is not Oracle or SAP. It's JDA. I just hope I get a chance to find out what that really means.
