- JD Edwards has said its acquisition of YOUcentric is complete, and the first fruits of the union are fit for consumption.
Last summer JD Edwards announced its plans to acquire customer relationship management (CRM) vendor YOUcentric in a cash and stock deal worth $US86 million.
Like its enterprise resource planning (ERP) rivals Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP, JD Edwards is looking to grab a share of the CRM software market, which Gartner estimates will grow from $US5.65 billion in 2001 to $US7.92 billion in 2002.
JD Edwards CRM 1.0 ties the features of YOUcentric's Java-based YOUrelate suite - which includes sales force automation, contact centre, customer service and marketing apps - to JD Edwards' flagship ERP suite, OneWorld.
The integration depends on JD Edwards' Extended Process Integration (XPI) middleware, which serves as a message broker and transports transactions from application to application.
In the past, JD Edwards has used XPI to customize business-to-business transactions within supply chain and ERP systems, the company says. For CRM 1.0, JD Edwards will ship the software with XPI adapters so users can connect the made-over YOUcentric apps to their own ERP or supply chain applications.
This is just the first phase of product integration, according to JD Edwards. The company says it will tie the new CRM suite to its demand planning, order promising and order configurator tools in releases due out next year.