Research

Publication Date: 15 February 2011 ID Number: G00209821

JDA Connects the Dots at Its European User Conference

Tim Payne, Greg Aimi

In October 2010, JDA Software held its first combined European JDA/i2 Technologies user and prospect conference, JDAConnect. Attendance was good, with lots of interest from prospects and users on how they can improve their supply chains. JDA informed its user base how it planned to support their evolving supply chain needs. Key Findings
JDA's first combined JDA/i2 European user conference was a success, with representation from both user communities. Users are focused on how to improve their supply chains and much less on the JDA product road maps. The company has quelled concerns by providing users with details. JDA is a major vendor in the supply chain planning (SCP) market, topped only by SAP and Oracle in terms of market share. During 2011 to 2013, JDA will bring to market its "superset" of converged Manugistics/i2 products in several SCP areas.

Recommendations
For end users: Look closely at JDA for SCP technology. The company offers product-portfolio breadth and industry coverage. Considering a new purchase from JDA? Factor into the decision-making process whether or not the target application will be the core product for the future, converged superset product. This can reduce future implementation and/or switching risks. Evaluate the planned enhancements for your solution. JDA plans to continue enhancing both product sets before the converged superset products are available.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

JDA did a good job integrating i2 into its operations after nearly 12 months. The product road maps are established and no longer causing concern to European users on either the JDA or exi2 side. A good mix of JDA and i2 users attended JDAConnect to hear about how JDA plans to leverage its extensive product portfolio and support users' SCP technology needs going forward. JDA's key tasks now are to deliver on its converged products over the next two to three years, turn its product road maps into reality, build sales momentum in the traditional i2 user bases, and align overall company vision with product road maps and capabilities.

EVENT

Event Facts
On 18-20 October 2010, JDA Software held its European user and prospect conference, JDAConnect, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The conference was the first in Europe since the company's acquisition and integration of i2 Technologies. About 400 customers and prospects attended this year's event, with a good balance between JDA and i2 users.

Analysis
JDA claims about 6,400 customers and 3,000 employees globally across all the acquired products now in its portfolio, and it's currently running at 97% maintenance retention. On a trailing 12-month basis, JDA is selling about $130 million in supply chain management (SCM) software per year (license and subscription), making it the biggest SCP software company behind SAP and Oracle.

JDA's Strategic Initiatives

During the keynote, JDA's CEO Hamish Brewer outlined three strategic initiatives the company will focus on going forward.

The Shelf-Connected Supply Chain

This is JDA's vision for supply chain integration from the retail shelf back through to suppliers and manufacturers. This is nothing particularly new for JDA. When it acquired Manugistics in 2005, the company made a lot of noise about the software coverage it had across retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers and suppliers. Now with its i2 acquisition, JDA is only sharpening up its message. The company is positioning the impressive scalability characteristics of the ex-Manugistics platform. This platform will form the foundation for the new one on which the planning and scheduling applications will sit. As manufacturers reach out to the retail shelf, the number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) and datasets they must analyze grows exponentially. This is often a rate-determining step in how consumer-focused a manufacturer can be. Overall, this theme fits well with the Gartner DDVN maturity model, which helps manufacturing gain better demand insights (see "Aligning AMR's DDVN and Gartner's Chaos-Tolerant Supply Chain Maturity Frameworks"). Once JDA builds out the capability and its messaging, users should be able to identify an SCM process upgrade path that will support them through the different DDVN maturity stages. With the retail, Manugistics and now i2 applications, combined with an evolving platform that's part Manugistics and part i2, users have access to one of the stronger, integrated SCP technologies on the market today.

Publication Date: 15 February 2011/ID Number: G00209821 2011 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

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Integrated Planning and Execution for Retail

JDA plans to integrate planning and execution capabilities across the retail section of the supply chain. Truly a subset of the "shelf-connected supply chain," this initiative is firmly focused on getting retailers to look at how they link planning and execution.

Managed Services
This is JDA's approach to building on its hosting capabilities and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) capabilities i2 was getting into prior to the acquisition. JDA claims to have over 1 million users in about 35 countries accessing software through its managed services group. To support this, the company now has seven data centers and 10 support centers around the world. The breakdown for this impressive number of users is probably more skewed toward E3 than the Manugistics and i2 solution sets. E3 is an AS/400 application, and many end-user organizations are actively seeking to remove this platform from their IT landscapes. External hosting of the application set is one relatively painless way to achieve this. i2 had been actively moving into SaaS deployments for some of its planning solutions, and JDA wants to build on this momentum.

Product Road Maps

Directly after the i2 acquisition in January 2010, there was a lot of initial interest (and confusion) from both JDA's and i2's users on how JDA was going to "square the circle" of two product portfolios with so much overlap. During JDA Focus, the company's U.S. user conference, in April 2010, it announced its product road maps, taking users through detailed sessions on the future of the different solutions. JDA repeated this exercise at JDAConnect. However, judging by the lack of attendance at these road-map sessions, the company has either delivered its road-map message effectively (all the product road maps are available to users on the JDA website, www.JDAUser.com), or customers have heard all they need and lost interest in the specific details. Either way, JDA (mainly the ex-Manugistics) and i2 users seem comfortable with the way JDA has approached and crafted its go-forward product road map. Consider the following: JDA won't "sunset" any of the existing JDA or i2 solution sets, thus safeguarding any existing investments. The company will continue to enhance the majority of the existing ex-Manugistics and i2 products to help users continue to leverage and improve their ROI. These enhancements will count toward the eventual convergence of both product sets into a single superset product. JDA has stated it will provide full migration from either product set to the final superset product. For some application areas, however, it's likely users will be faced with a reimplementation, along with the associated implementation costs, where relevant. JDA's investment protection program ensures that existing users (on maintenance) don't have to relicense functionality again once it moves over to the new superset products, but they may be faced with substantial reimplementation costs. At the application level, JDA has made sensible and pragmatic decisions on the solutions that will form the foundation of the go-forward, superset converged product. For more foundational-level capabilities such as demand planning, JDA has chosen the ex-Manugistics products to be the new superset foundation. This is generally a good move, since they're the more robust and packaged of the two solution sets. For transportation, the i2 product will be the base for the new superset transportation management system (TMS), with distinct modules from the Manugistics product developed or integrated into the platform. For more exotic functionality, such as sales

Publication Date: 15 February 2011/ID Number: G00209821 2011 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

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and operations planning (S&OP) and multiechelon inventory optimization, the i2 products will form the foundation of the new solution. Again, this is a good move by JDA, since i2 had the edge on innovation, with superior capabilities in these areas. With the identifiable industry bent in the two solution sets, JDA will create industry-specific superset products. For areas such as master planning, the ex-Manugistics Master Planning solution will be the process-oriented solution and the ex-i2 Supply Chain Planner solution the discrete-oriented one. At the platform level, the ex-Manugistics WebWorks product (now called JDA Enterprise Architecture) will form the foundation of the new platform. This will allow JDA to continue to leverage the strong scalability properties of this platform in support of its "shelfconnected supply chain" theme. JDA will then look to take the configurability and agility characteristics of the ex-i2 Agile Business Process Platform (ABPP) to the JDA Enterprise Architecture. Together, they should provide one of the strongest SCP platforms in the market today, potentially giving JDA a significant competitive advantage by providing integrated, configurable, process-oriented and end-to-end SCP solutions.

Key Tracks
Sales and Operations Planning
Throughout the conference, there was a strong interest in S&OP. In fact, JDA held a joint workshop with Oliver Wight the day before JDAConnect, which was oversubscribed by more than 100%. Notably busy were the sessions outlining S&OP implementation case studies and the future road map for JDA's S&OP solution. Gartner has seen a significant increase in end-user interest in S&OP, from both a process and technology perspective. Following the i2 acquisition, JDA now has two S&OP solutions: JDA Executive S&OP Workbench and i2 Sales and Operations Management (S&OM). The company had worked closely with Oliver Wight to develop the JDA Executive S&OP Workbench, so close, in fact, that the Oliver Wight S&OP process steps were built directly into the software. However, the i2 S&OM solution is stronger from a number of angles: It has an Excel-based user interface that customers really like, there are significantly more deployments of S&OM, and i2 had used some of its optimization algorithms to strengthen its "what-if" capabilities. But in fairness, JDA did a better job of instantiating the S&OP process steps into its S&OP solution. Going forward, the company will continue to work with Oliver Wight and build up the S&OP process capability of the i2 S&OM solution as the basis for the S&OP superset product.

Transportation
With an entire two-day track of just transportation customer presentations, it was clear there's been a steady interest level and use in the i2 transportation strategic components (e.g., network design and transportation modeler) and the enterprise TMS (e.g., planning and execution). Presentations about the value obtained by performing strategic network modeling were given by PepsiCo and HeidelbergCement, with the latter showing how it was modeling transportation for sustainability objectives. General transportation management highlights included Kimberly-Clark, Loblaws and Caprabo, a Spanish grocery chain. Caprabo showed how it generated bottom-line transportation savings by using i2 transportation fleet-routing capabilities to support the operations of a centralized enterprise route-planning team. The team transformed the organization's delivery practices, creating dynamic routes, with more deliveries and fewer vehicles across seven distribution centers, and generating savings in the low double digits. Of particular attendee interest was how

Publication Date: 15 February 2011/ID Number: G00209821 2011 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

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P&G, as part of its "Flawless Supply Execution" corporate initiative, has gone the way of SaaS, offering FreightMatrix for its global transportation management capabilities.

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Publication Date: 15 February 2011/ID Number: G00209821 2011 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

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