JD Edwards to cloud—frequently asked questions (FAQs)
As Oracle’s JD Edwards customers look to the future and consider the benefits of cloud solutions, they often have questions about this transition and their options. Determining the right solution is especially challenging when considering changes to a solution as foundational as JD Edwards.
The following answers seek to address these frequently asked questions. We cover a lot of territory here—from cloud technology and applications to the specific options that are available for your business. As your enterprise technology partner, our goal is to help your organization determine the right path and timeline for cloud adoption. We hope this information helps you better evaluate and understand your options.
What does “in the cloud” mean?
Two primary characteristics define enterprise solutions as “in the cloud”:
1. The solution is accessed through the internet to a service that is not located on hardware that you own and maintain on your own premises.
2. The solution is subscription fee-based rather than paying upfront for a perpetual license. The subscription fees include technical support, and the solution provider applies patches and updates to the solution on your behalf.
Based on these points, JD Edwards applications are not “in the cloud.” They are traditional software applications sold through a perpetual license with annual maintenance fees. Also, these solutions have been historically deployed on premises.
The many options for cloud deployment broadly fall into two categories: SaaS (Software as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
- SaaS and Oracle Cloud Applications: Oracle Cloud Applications support the same business processes as JD Edwards. Many on-premises customers have completely shifted to Oracle Cloud Applications, while others are integrating JD Edwards with Oracle Cloud Applications to augment or add functionality.
- IaaS for JD Edwards: JD Edwards applications can be run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Rather than buying and maintaining hardware and network components, customers can instead subscribe to physical hardware and storage capacity and use these to run JD Edwards.
How do JD Edwards customers benefit from cloud adoption?
The primary advantages of migrating from JD Edwards to Oracle Cloud Applications include a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and ability to always stay current with software, security, and technology.
Unlike on-premises JD Edwards systems, there is no hardware to purchase or maintain. Maintenance tasks, such as applying security and technical patches as well as maintaining the operating system and applying updates, are all performed by Oracle. This reduces overhead costs across IT resources, including hardware and services provided by system administrators.
Many organizations also find the cloud adoption compelling because IT operations are not their core competency. By outsourcing system hardware, infrastructure, and maintenance to Oracle, you can better focus your time, energy, and resources on strategic initiatives, competitive differentiators, and other critical areas.
- Automatic quarterly updates with the latest improvements and technology, optimization of business processes, and greater agility.
- Access to next-generation technology, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, IoT, blockchain, and digital assistants (chatbots).
- Configurable cloud applications that eliminate the need for customization.
Do JD Edwards customers have to move to the cloud?
No.
As a JD Edwards customer, you can continue to run JD Edwards EnterpriseOne for as long as it suits the needs of your organization. Oracle continues to invest in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne with regulatory updates, functional enhancements, simplified and automated system administration, and strategic, new capabilities that drive digital process transformation. New JD Edwards features are available quarterly, with hundreds of new capabilities every year.
In addition, as specified in the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy for Oracle Applications Guide (PDF), Oracle has extended the Premier Support for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2 until at least 2032, reinforcing our commitment to customers and product innovation. This commitment provides more than 10 years of product support, giving JD Edwards customers more than a decade to make decisions about their cloud options based on what is right for their business.
While JD Edwards customers can continue using their current system, a growing number of companies choosing to move to Oracle Cloud Applications. Since JD Edwards customers are also Oracle customers, you benefit from a cloud approach that offers subscription-based applications, industry-leading analytics capabilities, and an infinitely scalable infrastructure to support your growing business needs.
What are Oracle Cloud Applications?
Oracle Cloud Applications are a comprehensive suite of SaaS applications for running all aspects of your business across finance, HR, operations, supply chain, and more. Engineered to work together, all Oracle Cloud Applications share a common data model that brings unites business functions to seamlessly connect your business, processes, and people.
Our complete suite of cloud applications includes Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Supply Chain Management & Manufacturing (SCM) for organizing and modernizing your financials, risk management, procurement, supply chain, and more. Oracle’s human capital management (HCM) and advertising and customer experience (CX) cloud applications provide organizations with human resources, workforce planning, and payroll as well as marketing, sales, and service.
All Oracle Cloud Applications are SaaS offerings in a subscription model with quarterly updates that keep your organization current with the latest security, features, and technologies. Oracle Cloud Applications include robust analytics and reporting, next-generation technologies, and a modern user experience.
Can Oracle Cloud Applications meet our needs?
Yes.
As a JD Edwards customer, you can be confident that Oracle Cloud Applications will tackle your challenges and position your business for growth. Thousands of customers are already successfully managing their organizations with Oracle Cloud Applications.
Oracle Cloud Applications leverage Oracle’s collective experience across many solutions including: Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Demantra, Siebel CRM, and Agile PLM.
JD Edwards customers of all sizes and industries throughout the world have moved to, or extended their applications with, Oracle Cloud Applications. Their experience has confirmed that Oracle’s ERP, EPM, SCM, HCM, and CX cloud functionalities support their requirements today, while establishing a strong foundation for the future with next-generation technologies. These applications also support the planning, budgeting, HR/payroll, and CRM functionalities that were previously managed with JD Edwards.
In recent publications, analyst firm Gartner has named Oracle Cloud Applications as a Leader in the categories of ERP, HCM, and EPM. In addition to the thousands of customers using our cloud application, Oracle uses all of its own fusion cloud applications to run its business. With over 135,000 employees and $40 billion in annual revenue, we run our massive global operations using our own cloud technology.
Since solutions and technologies evolve rapidly, we recommend you evaluate Oracle Cloud Applications against your current and future business requirements and objectives, rather than using your current system as a checklist for comparison.
Can we use Oracle Cloud Applications with JD Edwards?
Yes.
Your JD Edwards solution can be integrated with Oracle Cloud Applications. By integrating your solution with Oracle Cloud Applications, you can incrementally move business processes to the cloud. Many JD Edwards customers start their journey by implementing components of Oracle Cloud Applications for business processes they do not currently manage with JD Edwards.
For example, if you use JD Edwards with third-party solutions for planning and budgeting, talent management, and supplier management, you can move those functions to Oracle Cloud Applications. Another approach is to modernize the management of functions currently performed using JD Edwards by moving those functions to Oracle Cloud.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also delivers emerging technologies, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, IoT, blockchain, and digital assistants. By adding these next-generation cloud capabilities to your JD Edwards solution, you are better prepared for an increasingly technology-driven, digital future. Moreover, the expertise you develop in those areas will be invaluable when you decide to fully adopt a cloud application.
How do customizations work with Oracle Cloud Applications?
It’s always in your best interest to minimize customizations with the goal of eventually eliminating them altogether. Customizations are expensive to build and maintain. Customers often acknowledge that they have customizations that could be retired and replaced with similar applications that are available in Oracle Cloud.
Oracle has invested heavily to provide you with ways to continue tailoring the solution to your unique needs without expensive customizations. Features such as personalization and form extensions enable you to retire and replace old customizations. Like all SaaS solutions, Oracle Cloud Applications are configurable and not customizable. This configuration approach enables Oracle to deploy regular system updates, ensuring your users have access to new features and technologies quarterly.
Customers typically find cloud adoption to be easier than they expected, and they use an on-premises to cloud project to simplify, standardize, and automate their business processes. SaaS solutions have changed the expectations for enterprise software. In this digital era, infrequent updates are a barrier to the software’s ability to contribute value to the organization. The nature of cloud applications ensures that organizations permanently stop carrying these unnecessary costs.
Many customers find that their IT or business stakeholders already have experience migrating a customized solution to a configurable SaaS solution—which makes the transition easier than expected. In addition, customers often find that their customizations are related to reporting and are no longer necessary with the robust reporting available in all Oracle Cloud Applications.
How do integrations work with Oracle Cloud Applications?
Many customers have other business systems integrated with JD Edwards. Those integrations can continue with Oracle Cloud Applications using Oracle Integration Cloud, which enables you to easily and efficiently set up, automate, and manage complex integrations across your landscape. This includes both cloud-to-cloud and cloud to on-premises applications.
Oracle Integration Cloud provides integration between Oracle Cloud Applications and virtually any application, service, or datastore. Oracle Integration eliminates barriers between business applications through a combination of prebuilt adapters, process automation templates, and a visual builder for web and mobile app development. Prebuilt application adapters and integration flows simplify the technical aspects of dealing with low-level APIs. This makes SaaS integration six to ten times faster to deliver while reducing upgrade risks. Process automation brings agility with an easy, visual, low-code platform.
How are Oracle Cloud Applications maintained?
Oracle Cloud Applications are maintained with automatic, quarterly system updates. You can deploy (enable, configure, and use) these updates to your schedule.
It’s important to monitor the new features that are released and planned for each quarterly update. When deploying updates, testing is recommended to ensure business processes run properly. In addition, proactively communicate updates to users as they are deployed. Existing JD Edwards customers who use a continuous adoption process will have a smooth transition to this model of consuming updates.
Which customer stories feature their journey from JD Edwards to Oracle Cloud Applications?
Many JD Edwards customers from a variety of industries and geographic areas have successfully made the move to Oracle Cloud Applications, each taking a unique path that best supported their business needs. Here are examples of JD Edwards customers who have either moved to or extended their system using Oracle Cloud Applications.
LifeScan migrates to Oracle Cloud ERP
How do we run JD Edwards on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a IaaS platform for building and running applications, such as JD Edwards. OCI lets you use the computing, network, and storage capabilities of Oracle Cloud on a subscription basis that minimizes the costs of hardware and routine maintenance. You cut operational costs while increasing automation, speed, and agility.
OCI provides an infinite amount of capacity that automatically scales up and down. This provides increased performance, improved security, and reduced total cost of ownership. With OCI, Oracle manages an all-Oracle stack that includes hardware, database, and applications, which improves overall lifecycle management.
The JD Edwards One-Click Provisioning Tool is an efficient, automated framework for deploying JD Edwards on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. JD Edwards also provides a reference architecture optimized for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that is configured with ready-to-use security, offering high availability. Deploying JD Edwards on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure reference architecture is a template solution certified by JD Edwards, providing consistent implementation.
In some cases, customers need ongoing assistance for running JD Edwards on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For those customers, Oracle and many partners can provide managed services and day-to-day maintenance and operations of the environment.
Which customer stories feature their journey from JD Edwards to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
Many JD Edwards customers from a variety of industries and geographic areas have successfully made the move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), each taking a unique path that best supported their business needs. Here are examples of JD Edwards customers who have moved their on-premises environment to OCI.
Largest US lawn care company achieves 4-5x faster performance on OCI
Where can I find more information about moving to the cloud?
Oracle has a forum for Oracle JD-Edwards customers who are interested in learning more about Oracle Cloud Applications and best practices for cloud migration. This forum is a great resource for customers to engage with subject matter experts and Oracle’s product development teams. Pose questions, connect with experts, and share your thoughts and ideas. We are here to help on your journey to the cloud.
What’s the best path to the cloud?
There is not a monolithic solution that is best for every business. The best path to the cloud is the one that best fits the unique needs, goals, and technology strategy of your organization.
To determine your path, start by discussing your priorities and challenges with your stakeholders and technology partners. Your conversation should include a wide range of viewpoints, including input from system experts, functional users, organization leaders, and IT staff.
The conversation should include the current use and plans for JD Edwards. A couple things to keep in mind:
- Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure reduces your total ownership costs and provides more operational agility.
- Moving to Oracle Cloud Applications provides modernized business functions with the latest technology, and ensures that your organization stays current in the future.
At Oracle, we strive to be your trusted technology provider, advisor, and partner. We also appreciate your commitment to and recognize your success with JD Edwards. Whatever path you choose, Oracle will continue supporting your success, offering you choices, and providing advice regarding your journey.