JD Edwards aims products at SMEs
Enterprise resource planning software company JD Edwards is to aggressivelytarget medium-sized companies with a number of tailored products and services.
Enterprise resource planning software company JD Edwards is to aggressivelytarget medium-sized companies with a number of tailored products and services.
The company, which suffered falling revenues last year and was forced to layoff hundreds of workers globally, has identified 200,000 ‘marketopportunities’ that could yield potential revenues of more than $200bn,chief operating officer Hank Bonde told a press conference yesterday.
Details of the new drive will be revealed to more than 8,500 of thecompany’s customers at its user conference in Denver later today. The company currently has 6,000 customers, many of whom are large companieswith billion-dollar annual revenues. They typically pay around $400,000 foran ERP solution.
However the new One World advanced planning solutions specifically tailoredfor ‘mid-market-enterprises’ will cost less than $150,000. JD Edwards hasalso tailored training and implementation services for these businesses.Beneficiaries of this ‘very aggressive pricing’ will typically be companieswhose turnovers are less than $500m per annum.
Announcing the new products, Bonde quoted analysts from AMR Research whohave predicted that the enterprise commerce market will grow from about$108bn this year to nearer $264bn in 2005.
And he said the move to target smaller companies was part of a drive to’revitalise’ JD Edwards. ‘We have taken critical steps to better serve theunique needs of the mid-enterprise,’ he said.
‘We have significantly reduced the layers of management between ourexecutives and customers, trimmed $75mn in non-value-adding costs from ourbusiness, reorganized our worldwide sales territories, and strengthened ourinvestments in product development, marketing, training and services. Thishas helped create a reinvigorated, focused JD Edwards.’
CEO, president and chairman Ed McVaney added: ‘Too often, vendors offermid-enterprise companies either overly complex and expensive technologiesgeared for large enterprises, or rudimentary software that barely meetstheir current, let alone future, needs.’
But Chief marketing officer Les Wyatt said that was no longer the case: ‘JDEdwards now offers much-needed advanced planning solutions to theoften-neglected but highest-growth segment for collaborative supply chainapplications – mid- enterprise companies and divisions of Global 1000companies with revenues of $250mn to $3bn.’
The company also announced a deal with Andersen to target the automotiveindustry and said that reports of the death of application service providerswas exaggerated by reporting 50 new ASP customer last month. The wins takethe company’s total number of ASP customers globally to 360.
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JD Edwards slashes global workforce