J.D. Edwards & Company - Oneworld, History

J.D. Edwards & Company develops, produces, and markets software applications packages for business. It develops applications that can be used in every aspect of business, including supply, finance, human resources, manufacturing, and planning, and by most business sectors, such as chemicals, automobiles, arts and entertainment, and energy. Its flagship products, OneWorld and WorldSoftware, incorporate tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain planning, knowledge management, and process integration. Services related to its software, such as training and consulting make up about 50 percent of J.D. Edwards' business.

In its software packages, J.D. Edwards made "interoperability" a byword. Beginning in the middle 1990s, J.D. Edwards began creating software that included all the essential functions needed by a business and allowed those functions to work together smoothly. This idea grew into a strategy the firm termed "c-commerce," or collaborative commerce. The c-commerce software packages it developed, in particular OneWorld, were suites of component with a variety of applications that could be used across a company or an industry. Diverse applications which previously were incompatible could "interoperate" in J.D. Edwards software. It threw up bridgeheads across networks, be they intranets, extranets or the Internet. Departments within a company could exchange data; as could companies collaborating on projects. It no longer mattered that their applications or even their computer systems were different.

J.D. Edwards' c-commerce approach offered many benefits. Some 60 percent of Fortune 500 businesses depended on three or more technology platforms. Software like OneWorld helped integrate these systems. Individual firms could exchange data about common projects, products, and services across systems efficiently in real-time. In summer 2000 J.D. Edwards intensified its commitment to c-commerce adopting a best-of-breed strategy for its software line. The firm's enabled a customer to select the best applications packages regardless of who produced them, rather than purchasing every application bundled together in a monolithic package from a single vendor. J.D. Edwards' software was able to integrate the diverse software into a seamlessly functioning system. Best-of-breed offered firm's an additional advantage—if it decided to alter or replace an application, it could do so without replacing its entire software system.