Aaron Chappell:
Welcome to Staying Ahead of the Curve, Using Data-Driven Decision to Shape Your JDE Strategy. This presentation was originally delivered at Collaborate 17 back in April of 2017. We wanted to make it available online for folks who weren’t able to attend the conference or did attend the conference, but just weren’t able to make it to the session.
So, I also want to add a disclaimer. This is going to be a live recording or a raw recording all the way through, so please excuse any stumbling or mistakes here. But let’s just go ahead and jump on in.
So, my name is Aaron Chappell. I’m from Raleigh, North Carolina, and I’m married to my beautiful wife, Lauren, have two young children, Parker and Hayden. I’m a partner at Surety Systems, and I head up our JD Edwards Practice Group here. I’ve been in the ERP space for the past 14 years and have had the specific privilege to work in the JD Edwards space for the past seven years.
So, I want to talk a little bit about Surety Systems and who we are because I think that provides some context as to what we’re talking about today. So, Surety Systems is an Oracle Gold Partner. We provide senior level technical and functional consulting services for both World and EnterpriseOne companies, so whether you’re looking to bring in financial expertise, distribution, manufacturing, HR/Payroll, or if you’re on the technical side looking for E1 development or CNC administration or business services development, BI Publisher, really anything under the JD Edwards umbrella Surety Systems is suited to assist with, so I say that really just to illustrate that we’re not limited to one specific scope and focus within the JD Edwards space, but we’re really equipped to tackle everything. So, from a vantage point perspective we tend to see it all, and I think that is helpful when it comes to the results we’re going to talk about today.
So, what can I expect to learn today? So today we’re going to cover World versus EnterpriseOne usage over the years. We’re going to talk about current and historical upgraded option trends. We’re going to talk about interest in use of cloud, mobile, and Internet of Things technologies. We’ll chat about briefly I guess about the Quest for community participation over the years, and then finally we’ll wrap up with a three- to five-year outlook for the JD Edwards product.
But before we dive into the raw data, let’s talk about what our methodology was and how we collected the data. So everything you’re going to hear about today comes from our annual JD Edwards survey. This year the survey was conducted between February 14 and March 5, 2017. We’ve conducted this survey every year starting in 2010, so what that allows us to do is to incorporate some of the same questions each year so that now seven years into that we can start to trend some of the data. You’re going to see data reflected from participants all over the United States and across many industries. We do have some participation from Canada, Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, that type of thing, but really the core data that you’re going to see today is really representative of the continental United States or customers in the continental United States.
Typically each year we have 350 or about 350 responses. This year we had 422 responses with 478 partial responses, so we feel like that’s a really strong sample size from the JD Edwards community.
So, what does the JD Edwards community look like? Well, 47 percent of the JD Edwards ecosystem come from the manufacturing industry with 13 percent coming from the distribution industry, and then you start to see a nice little industry-specific specialization with commercial and residential construction, government, real estate management, oil and gas, and then services. I think it’s interesting to note that these seven industries represent 93 percent of the JD Edwards population.
And how large is the typical JD Edwards company? Well, 78 percent of the JD Edwards community is working at companies at or below 5 thousand employees with 12 percent being between 5 and 10 thousand employees and just 10 percent working at companies that are larger than 10 thousand employees. So what this shows me really is that the strength of that mid-market ERP solution that JD Edwards is, with the vast majority or the large majority working at companies that are less than 5 thousand employees.
And what types of people are taking this survey? Where are these responses coming from? It’s important to note that 61 percent of our responses typically come from the management layer, so this is your CIO, your VP of IT, your IT Director, and so forth, 21 percent come from a functional background, so business analysts, 18 percent from a technical background, E1 developers, World programmer analysts or CNC administrators.
So, diversity is always important, but I do think it’s important to note that we always try to have a greater participation from the management layer because these are individuals within a company that have a vantage point where they can see, not only what their long-term IT strategy is but really can speak competently about the different systems that they are currently running. So we want to make sure we always have a heavier influence of management participation because we feel like that really shores up the integrity of our results.
So, let’s talk about versions and upgrades, and I want to talk first about platform usage between World and EnterpriseOne over the years. In 2010, 70 percent of our responses were from EnterpriseOne companies versus 30 percent running on the World platform. In 2015, EnterpriseOne had risen up to 80 percent and World had dropped to 20 percent. And now in 2017, 86 percent of companies are on EnterpriseOne versus 14 percent World. So on the bright side EnterpriseOne is becoming more popular, but for World what’s happening to these World customers, where are they going, and what’s happening there, and we’re going to talk about that later on in the presentation.
So let’s begin with World version trends over the years. So, this graph represents World versioning distribution in 2010. You’ll notice zero data points for A9.3 and A9.4 because they didn’t exist at the time. What I want to draw your attention to here is the popularity of A7.3 in 2010, even though versions 9.1 and 9.2 were available. Here’s what things looked like in 2013 and here’s what things look like now in 2017. So A9.4 has shown up, and let’s talk about A9.4. Let’s pick on A9.4 for a little bit. So it’s 2017, A9.4 was released in April of 2015 so we’re about two years into the product lifecycle for version A9.4. Now the challenge is that two years in we still see a small 6 percent adoption rate for the A9.4 version. Now, let’s look over here at A7.3 because A7.3 has dropped significantly and a lot of people between 2013 and 2017 have upgraded to this A9.3 product, so what I can tell here is it looks like a lot of people, the vast majority of the community, upgraded to 9.3 and then decided they wanted to stop.
So, this is a nice graphic representation but let’s look at how things look by the numbers. In 2010, 64 percent of World customers were running version A7.3. Just 22 percent of World customers were running the most current versions of A9.1 or A9.2, but by 2015 that number had switched. Twenty-five percent of World customers were on version A7.3 and 64 percent of World customers were running the more current versions available at the time, 9.2 and 9.3.
So, what’s influencing this? Well, I think we have to give credit to the increased value and functionality of A9.3, the A9.3 product. I think A7.3 support ending in 2013 had a major hand in this, and then I think we also have to give a tip of the hat to the “Upgrade to the 9s” campaign that was back from 2012 and 2013.
So now let’s take a look at the EnterpriseOne side. So for this graph, I want us to think in terms of the number of versions behind the current at the time, and I’ve selected 2010 and 2015 to spotlight because in each of those years we had a current mature version. So in 2010, 9.0 was mature. In 2015, 9.1 was mature. So, what we’re looking here at these green graphs, they represent companies that were three plus versions behind current in each of those years, and here’s two versions back, one version back behind current, and now current version.
So what’s interesting to note here is that back in 2010 almost half of the JD Edwards community, 45 percent, were three plus versions behind current, so they were running versions 8.10 or older, even though 9.0 was available. But by 2015, 80 percent of the JD Edwards community was within one version of being current. And now, here’s what things look like in 2017, so the 18 percent figure that you’re looking at here on the right, this is 9.2 and I don’t think that’s necessarily a negative response because remember, 9.2 was released…it was really released in October of 2015, but to me I kind of consider that to be a 2016 release because it was so late in 2015.
So at the time of the survey, the 9.2 version was only about a year old, but what I think is significant here is that 18 percent is not so bad. So this is 9.0, 9.2, 9.1, and 9.0, so this added up equals 90 percent of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne community that are running versions 9.0 or higher. So what we can see is that there’s been a shift in culture towards being code-current.
And I’m reminded of a conversation I had with John Schiff, he’s a former VP over at Oracle. I was at the Partner Summit back in February of 2016 and John was gracious enough to sit down with me and chat with me about some of the things going on at Oracle, and one of the things that he mentioned was that Oracle was trying to change the perception of upgrades. He said, you know, typically or traditionally customers look at upgrades as these big daunting tasks and they look at the upgrade decision, they get scared, and they say I’m just not going to do it, I’m going to stay where I’m at. He said Oracle wants to make things easier. He wants to make Oracle…or they want to make upgrades smaller steps rather than giant leaps so that they could then shift the culture towards being more code-current, and it’s interesting to see that over the years you can see that strategy playing out, so I thought that was pretty interesting. And here’s another representation specifically of just the 2017 version results.
So let’s talk about approaches. So we asked customers how are you approaching…what is your approach to the 9.2 upgrade. Six percent responded that they would consider themselves to be early adopters, you know, within the first six to eight months of the product release. Fifty-five percent responded that they want to wait until Oracle worked all the bugs and kinks out. Twenty-four percent said that they have a strategic position to stay one version behind the current just so that it ensures them that they’re always working with a mature version that’s bug-free. And then 15 percent responded that they don’t have any plans to upgrade at all. I don’t think that’s necessarily a negative number just because you have to consider some of those people are going to be part of companies that had upgraded to 9.1 just before 9.2 was released, so they may still be fairly new to that 9.1 product.
So, observations. So, what does that mean? I consider 61 percent of the community to be what I consider “early stage” adopters, so that’s the 6 percent early adoption plus the 55 percent that wait for Oracle to work the kinks out, so those are going to be people that upgrade early in the product release cycle with 39 percent tending to be cautious or taking a cautious adoption approach.
So let’s talk about upgrade plans. So we also asked on the World side, we asked companies do you plan to upgrade your World system within the next 12 months, and the green graph that you see here represents customers that said yes, we plan to upgrade in the next 12 months, the positive response. So what you see here is you see a nice steady increase heading into a release year. This is where A9.3 was released, there’s a little bit of a dip, you know, maybe people took a look at the upgrade, made a decision, and you see a little bit of a decline. This could just be a statistical anomaly, but upgrade interest stays steady in 2014 but then bottoms out towards the end of the product release cycle for A9.3. And then you see a nice little gradual increase in upgrade interest heading to the release of 9.4. People took a look at the 9.4 product and then decided that they just were going to either upgrade or not upgrade. And then you see a decline here in 2017.
So what I want to point out here for the 2017 piece is we talked earlier about how in 2017, 9.4 only has a 6 percent adoption rate so that means to me if 6 percent is actually using A9.4 that means that 94 percent, the remaining 94 percent of the World community is in what I consider an upgradeable position where they can upgrade to 9.4 if they’d like. Now the tough news here is that out of that 94 percent, of the people remaining that are eligible to upgrade only 15 percent plan to actually make that upgrade in the next year.
Similarly, let’s look at the EnterpriseOne side of things, and this graph to me follows what I would consider…what I would expect in more of a life cycle. You have upgrade interest peaking here toward the release year of 9.1 and then it dropping and bottoming out here in the middle of the product release cycle and gradually building back up to the release of 9.2, and remember I consider it a 2016 release. But what I think is really different here is look how upgrade interest doesn’t decline after 2016, just like it declined after 2012. What I think we’re seeing here, why it’s sustaining into 2017 is twofold. I think number one, we’re seeing that culture shift towards being co-current that John Schiff talked about, but then I think we’re also seeing the effects of that other 55 percent of the community that wanted to wait for Oracle to work out the bugs. So 6 to 12 months into a release cycle that’s where that 55 percent’s going to come in.
Also, now that we’re a year into the new release we can now start to ask how effective is Oracle in achieving this goal of making the upgrade easy? So this year we asked how easy was your 9.2 upgrade. We received 58 responses and only three said that it was difficult, so 95 percent of our responses said that the upgrade was either moderate or easy, so it looks like Oracle’s achieving their goal.
So now let’s chat through about new JD Edwards’ technology, and let’s start off with mobile. So we asked customers about their mobile adoption rates and 11 percent said that they were using mobile, and I think this graph perfectly illustrates what we’ve seen in mobile adoption over the past several years. So when we started asking about mobile adoption in 2012 we received a 2 percent adoption rate. By 2013 that number had grown to 8 percent, and by 2015 that number had peaked at 12 percent, and since 2015 the number’s kind of gone back and forth between 11 and 12 percent.
So, there has been adoption growth on the mobile side, but much like the evolutionary process it’s been fairly slow, and interestingly enough the past three years it’s really kind of plateaued, so it makes me wonder if the community is really waiting on some sort of technological leaps forward. Maybe that’s on the security side as it relates to mobile or something else. But I’m wondering if there’s some technological advancement that will get people a little bit more comfortable to jump in on the mobile side.
And now let’s talk about cloud. So we asked customers, are you using cloud for any of your IT-related systems? Seventy-two percent said yes, they are. Then we went a step further and asked, are you using any of Oracle’s cloud products, and we received a chilly 28 percent response. The good news for Oracle, that 28 percent—that’s probably much lower than Oracle would prefer by the way—but the good news for Oracle is when we started asking the question, and the same question in 2015, we got a 15 percent response rate, so the number over the past two or three years has grown from 15 percent up to 28 percent adoption, so Oracle’s cloud market is growing.
Then we asked customers, what’s your cloud strategy over the next three to five years, and they could tell us…they could say things like we plan to go 100 percent to the cloud, we plan to incorporate a hybrid approach, we’ve taken a look at cloud and it is absolutely not going to be for us, or they could say we’re elevating but we’re not sure yet, or hey, we haven’t even started to evaluate yet. So we took those responses, and I’ve divided them into three categories, positive, negative, and uncertain.
So the positive group here, this 11 percent, represents customers who plan to go 100 percent to the cloud or adopt a hybrid solution. The negative cloud obviously represents customers that do not want to go to cloud at all. And then the uncertain group, that’s much bigger than I thought that it would be. You know, all we’ve seemed to have heard for the past several years is cloud this and cloud that, and it’s interesting to me that so many customers haven’t picked a side yet.
I do think that over the next few years you’re going to see that uncertainty cloud really start to shrink, and customers are really going to pick either to utilize cloud or to not utilize cloud. I do want to draw your attention one more time before we head to the next slide. Let’s look at this positive cloud. I think it’s interesting to note that out of that group only 3 percent said that they plan to go to a 100 percent cloud option, which means the future to me of JD Edwards as it relates to cloud is not necessarily an all-in-the-cloud type solution, but rather a hybrid future.
And then we asked customers, how would you, or how are you using cloud as it relates to your IT systems? And what I think is interesting to note is really outside of HR/Payroll it’s not really happening with the core ERP functionality. What’s happening is people are using cloud for other types of areas, areas that bolt into JD Edwards that extend and enhance your core ERP functionality. So I was interested to see that the core ERP functionality and cloud usage still remains pretty low.
Now let’s talk about the Internet of Things. This might be actually my favorite topic. I think this graph really accurately portrays a challenge that the IoT space faces right now. So this group of people represents the entire JD Edwards community, and we’ve highlighted some of them in bright blue, 83 percent of them, because they are awarded, they represent the percentage of the JD Edwards population that is aware of what Internet of Things is. Now the good news is when we started asking the question in 2015, only 65 percent of people were even aware of what it was, so that awareness has grown from 65 percent up to 83 percent.
And in this group of green folks represents the percentage of the population that represents or that understands how their companies could actually leverage Internet of Things technology. And now this orange group of people represents the folks that are actually using Internet of Things at their company, so that’s about a quarter of the JD Edwards population. But what I think is interesting is if you go back and look at when someone understands how to leverage IoT, once you understand how, there’s a 65 percent chance that you will actually take that next step further and implement that at your company.
So, now we can turn our attention back to this group of blue people because really the challenge for spreading the usage of IoT relies on taking this group of blue people and converting them from the what into the how and helping them understand how IoT can help them out because what this shows is that once they understand the how there’s a good likelihood that they’ll actually go in and incorporate it into their IT systems. The challenge though is that there’s not a silver bullet pitch for the Internet of Things technology. There’s no one way to say if you do this then you’ll achieve that ROI.
I think the future of Intent of Things really is going to rely heavily on storytelling, it’s going to be use cases of companies sharing how they’ve used it, even if they’re in a different industry and the creative light bulb is going off in the heads of business people of, wow, what if we tried it like this or tried that. So I think that’s really what’s going to move that technology adoption forward, but like I said, the data is showing that really the challenge is converting people, helping people come from what…knowing what Internet of Things technology is and converting them over to understanding how they can actually leverage it.
So let’s talk briefly about staying connected in the JD Edwards space. We asked customers, is your company involved in Quest, the Quest community, and are you personally involved in the Quest community? So from a company involvement perspective, company involvement’s kind of stayed the same over the past seven years. Starting out around 50 percent in 2010 and it’s risen, but just up to about 53 percent. But personal involvement on the other hand has risen from 34 percent up to 45 percent.
And I want to draw your attention to this space right here. This represents the time between 2012 and 2014. You’ll note that, yes, company growth is happening, but there’s a disproportionate growth of people participating in Quest, it doesn’t match the company growth. So I’m reminded of a conversation that I had with a guy named Jim Whalen, he’s the CIO of Boston Properties, and Jim, if you’re listening, hi.
So in 2014 I was at the INFOCUS ’14 conference and I happened to share a cab ride from the conference to the airport with Jim, just dumb luck we ended up sharing a cab, and at the time Jim was on the Quest board of directors. And so, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity and I said, hey, Jim, what’s going on with Quest these days, you know, what are they up to? And he said, Aaron, we’re shifting strategies from a RUG-based, a Regional User Group-based strategy, over to a SIG-based strategy, Special Interest Group. And he said the reason why we’re doing that is because really with the RUG-based strategy all you really have in common with folks is, hey, I work with JD Edwards and I live in the same city or I’m from the same state, whereas with a SIG-based strategy, Special Interest Group, there’s really going to be…every JD Edwards employee is going to have some interest there. There’s going to be something for everybody because you’re going to have a financial SIG, you’re going to have a distribution SIG, you’re going to have a manufacturing or a technology SIG, that type of thing.
So I think what we’re seeing here is that, yes, company participation was rising, but because Quest had something for everyone with the SIG-focus strategy, that’s why more people per company were starting to participate, so I thought that was really cool how the data, if you start to look back, the data shows the fruits of that strategy shift.
This year was also unique in that this is the first year we had actually partnered with Oracle to conduct the survey, so Oracle helped to promote the survey, we wanted to drive more participation and greater results, things like that, and so in exchange for Oracle’s partnership we allowed them to include any question that they wanted to pose to the JD Edwards community and collect data on. And so this year Oracle chose to ask the JD Edwards community, where do you want us to focus our product development as it relates to the JD Edwards roadmap?
And so they gave us five choices, and the choices are here below and they asked participants to rate these choices in the order of one through five. So one would be a top priority, five would be a bottom priority. So the options they gave us for ranking priorities would be improvements for end-user experience, platform improvements to help lower operating costs, integration between Oracle and non-Oracle cloud products, enhancements to core ERP functionality, and then finally enhancements to industry-specific enhancements.
So I’ll give you just a second, take a look, and I’ll let you think about how you yourself would prioritize those before we talk about how the community actually chose. Okay, so what I can tell you is that there was a clear preference towards one of these in the JD Edwards community, and there was also a clear preference for low priority for two of these. So, product enhancements for core ERP functionality, 55 percent of the JD Edwards community specifically placed this option as their number one space, in their number one space, that is statistically significant.
On the other hand, almost half of the JD Edwards community, 48 percent, placed platform improvements to lower operating costs and integration between Oracle and non-Oracle cloud products as their fourth and fifth priorities. And then in the middle there was an even distribution between end-user experience enhancements or improvements, and then also industry-specific enhancements. I think the interesting thing though to take away is that Oracle is listening. They’re interested in engaging the JD Edwards community and they want to know where the community wants their focus to be. So, for no other reason I think it’s great that they even asked the question and that this was the specific question they chose to include this year.
So let’s bring everything on home and wrap things up by talking about the future outlook of JD Edwards, and I want to start with the perception. So, we asked everybody this year to in one word describe their thoughts on the future of JD Edwards and you see a lot of positive stuff, stability, solid, exciting, bright, but our most common response was uncertainty and to me that revealed a lot, that among the JD Edwards community the perception of the future is uncertain. So I wanted to chat, and let’s take a look at the data. Let’s see what the data says about the future of JD Edwards. And first let’s start with World. So, every year we ask World customers, what is your plan for the next three to five years as it relates to your confidence and your commitment to the World product? So this orange line represents the responses of people that said they are planning to stay on World over the next three to five years.
And so, what you’ll notice here is, I want to draw your attention to this. You know, everything stays kind of right around 50 percent, you know, everything’s kind of nice and even, you know, not a lot of big difference, but then all of a sudden things kind of go squirrely between 2014 and 2016. So what’s happening here? Why is this going kind of crazy?
So I want to draw your attention back to the upgrade plans. This is the graph you saw earlier in the presentation. Remember, this graph is people who are planning to upgrade within the next 12 months, not actually happening but planning for it to happen within the next 12 months. Notice that upgrade plans are at their peak in 2014, and notice that commitment to stay on World is at its peak the next year in 2015. Notice how upgrade plans plummet in 2015, and then commitment plans plummet in 2016.
So what we can see here is that there’s a pretty direct relationship between plans to upgrade and confidence in a company staying on World over the next three to five years. And now let’s add in a blue line and this is a blue line. This blue line represents customers that have responded. In the next three to five years they plan to go to another ERP. The way this line should behave is there should be…in theory, there should be a polar relationship between these two lines.
So, for instance in 2012 when commitment to World goes up there should be less companies that are interested in going to another ERP, and then obviously as World confidence declines you should see a corresponding increase in threat to go to another ERP. But let’s look at 2014. So the confidence here in the World product drops, but you don’t see a corresponding rise in plans to go to another ERP, or even over here in 2016, look at this big significant decline in plans to stay on the World, but you don’t see a proportionate increase in the threat to go to another ERP.
So, what’s happening here? And the answer is that customers are planning to migrate to EnterpriseOne, so where you expect to see the blue line rise, that’s where you’re seeing it. As World confidence declines, EnterpriseOne plans start to rise. As World confidence declines in 2016, World confidence rises in…or E1 plans rise in 2016.
So, let’s take a look at this by the numbers. So in 2011, 45 percent of the companies expected to stay on World, 12 percent expected to migrate to EnterpriseOne, and 20 percent expected to migrate to another non-JD Edwards ERP. In 2017, 23 percent expect to stay on World, 42 percent expect to migrate to EnterpriseOne, and 30 percent expect to migrate to another non-JD Edwards ERP. So if you look at the threat to going to another non-JD Edwards ERP, that threat still exists and it is still gaining traction between 2011 and 2017, but what you can see there as moving to EnterpriseOne has shifted from 12 percent to 42 percent, is that EnterpriseOne is an increasingly attractive landing space for World customers so that’s a good sign.
So, let’s talk about the EnterpriseOne side of things, and so I want to start off again…let’s go back to this upgrade graph that we had talked about earlier and again, remember…I think the thing to take away from this is remember how this behaves what you would normally like to see out of a product or expect to see out of a product release cycle. So we’re going to take these data points and we’re going to put them on a graph. So, this green line again represents upgrade plans within the next 12 months, and then we’re going to add in the orange line. This orange line represents EnterpriseOne companies that plan to stay with EnterpriseOne for the next three to five years.
So what I think first of all what I want to point out is look at the relationship here between increase in upgrade plans and then two years later there’s an increase in confidence. Where there’s a decrease in upgrade plans, two years later there’s a decrease in confidence. So there again is the correlation between upgrades and confidence.
So, let’s go here and look at 2012. This is the release year for 9.1. Well, the confidence in staying on EnterpriseOne for three to five years hits an all-time low heading into the release year, and I think there’s a couple of things that play here. Number one, we talked about it earlier, when new releases become available customers have a choice and if that upgrade is tough and appears to be tough, then they’re going to look elsewhere. They’re going to look to competitors of JD Edwards or competitors of Oracle. The other thing to note here too is look at how it bottoms out, how long it bottoms out here for.
So, the other thing that you can say too is that the longer that a release cycle exists, the more vulnerable Oracle is to losing that customer to another ERP system. So, if you’re Oracle you want to do two things. You want to, number one, make upgrades easier because people will be more inclined to take that upgrade and reestablish their commitment to JD Edwards to re-up, and then you want to shorten that release cycle because what’ll happen is that the shorter a release cycle is, the smaller amount of time you spend here at the bottom of this orange line. And so I think that’s what you’re seeing here in Oracle strategy. They want to make upgrades easier to do, to shift towards co-current, and then instead of making upgrades large tasks, they want to make them smaller. That’s why they’re shifting towards implementing more service packs.
So, I think it’s interesting to show the graph, the historical data show that that strategy is solid in sound. And what I think you’ll also notice here is that as releases become more frequent and easier to complete, what you’re going to see is this confidence line and this upgrade plan line become more in sync like what you’re seeing here instead of being far apart. And then you’re also going to see the confidence line really just start to peak and come up and stay up.
So what can we expect of the next couple of years? I think we’re going to see a sustained EnterpriseOne 9.2 upgrade path through at least mid-2018, and then I think we’re going to start to see a decline. I think everybody that’s going to upgrade is going to upgrade by then, and I think you’re always going to have your folks that choose to stay on XE or 811 or 812, but I think everybody that’s going to upgrade to 9.2 will do so by mid to late 2018.
I think we’re also going to see a positive three- to five-year commitment response into 2018 and into 2019, and as we see the current…or the new strategy of Oracle staying at 9.2 and just adding service pack updates and things like that, as we see that strat to play out I think what you’ll start to see is that that three to five-year commitment really maintains a positive steady progress. So really the reality is that EnterpriseOne is strong and JD Edwards’ World is strong because JD Edwards World customers are not leaving all together, they’re going to EnterpriseOne. So even though the perception seems to be uncertainty, the reality is that JD Edwards is in a really good spot.
Thank you, guys, for your time. Hopefully, you all hung out until the end of this thing. If you have any questions, please feel free, shoot me an email or give me a call. I love to talk about JD Edwards, would love to hear any comments that you might have. Thanks again.
About Aaron Chappell
Aaron is a Partner at Surety Systems and leads the firm’s Oracle JD Edwards practice group. He is a technology enthusiast, avid sports fan, devoted husband, and father of two.
