Oracle’s JD Edwards product line continues to thrive because its innovations are helping organizations to make a digital transformation. That’s a key message from the Oracle product management team at last week’s Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Out of a few dozen JD Edwards-related sessions, here are a few highlights.

OpenWorld traditionally starts with user group meetings and ends with product announcements and a technology-oriented keynote by Larry Ellison, CTO. The IBM Consortium for JD Edwards kicked off OpenWorld with a session about cognitive computing and COLLABORATE 2017. Many ask, what is cognitive computing? My short answer is that cognitive is the combination of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis. Or, as Andy Chase of Circular Edge says, it’s a computer that likes education. Or, as Steve Johnston of IBM says, cognitive systems develop insights and share expertise.

Oracle announced several new cloud offerings, of course: AppToCloud, Essbase Cloud Service, ChatBot Development Platform, Oracle Analytics Cloud Suite, Content & Experience Cloud. The ChatBot Development Platform starred in a short demo about interacting with virtual assistants. For JD Edwards customers, one key message from Larry’s keynote is about the future of on-premises applications. He noted, “We are in the middle of a generational change.” “There is going to be a 10 year period of co-existence where you have [both] data centers and applications in the cloud.”

In the JD Edwards General Session, Lyle Ekdahl and team launched into a passionate pitch about digital transformation. What is digital transformation? Before I give Lyle’s answer, I’ll observe that the definition seems to vary among audiences in my recent experience. Modern marketers have one take, document processing firms have another perspective, and ERP innovators such as the JD Edwards team have another view.

Lyle Ekdahl, Senior VP and General Manager of the JDE Edwards product team, places digital transformation as the means of succeeding in today’s digital economy. “It’s all about seizing windows of business opportunities while protecting the business – by achieving breakthroughs in business performance.” It is both a business and technology strategy, enabled by modern technologies such as JD Edwards. The three characteristics of the transformed “digital enterprise” in Lyle’s view are:

• Connected: the enterprise connects customers, mobile employees, products, and the supply chain, with enabling technologies such as IoT and mobility
• Agile: the enterprise minimizes the time to market and the time to value (think ROI), which also helps the enterprise respond to unforeseen threats and opportunities
• Real-time: Continuous data feeds connect with alerts and data visualizations to help enterprises analyze and act

As with Customer Experience and transforming customer journeys, an organization can start executing a digital transformation with the technology they currently own (Release 9.2 or earlier). You can learn more in my interview with Lyle in the OpenWorld issue of Q&A Magazine, launching online soon.

The greatest JD Edwards capabilities that enable digital transformation are part of Release 9.2, launched one year ago. More than 800 customers have downloaded 9.2, taking advantage of product innovations such as the Simplified Upgrade.

The JD Edwards team has been delivering capabilities to make it easier for “Citizen Developers” and technology staff to personalize and extend the JD Edwards user interface. UX One is the new umbrella moniker for all of these UX enhancements, including Page Composer. It’s a role-based user experience, adapted by where you are, your work role, and how you like to work. JD Edwards now offers more than 40 role-based landing pages. One key takeaway is that JD Edwards is offering an interaction model that seems to me will help many to accomplish quickly their “jobs needing to be done”. That model is Alert → Analyze → Act. The Analyze phase is powered by data visualizations and a new EnterpriseOne Search capability.

Oracle is making it easier to “trial” capabilities and move to the cloud the environments you choose. With Oracle’s Cloud Marketplace, you can do both. The advantage to customers is that the much of the infrastructure management burden has been automated for you. Furthermore, Oracle’s PaaS and IaaS options give you choice with control to extend or optimize your hybrid cloud environments.

Quest is rerunning Lyle’s General Session as part of our Quest Experience Week, October 18-20, 2017. Lyle’s session airs on October 18, 2017, 11:00 – 12:15 Eastern (register here).

As the week progressed, additional sessions drilled deeper into digital transformation and technical topics. Concurrently, customers learned throughout the week about the latest industry-specific capabilities and customer success stories in industries such as manufacturing, consumer goods, asset-intensive, and project-based sectors. For example, Skanska Civil told the story about how their engineering and construction firm recently selected JD Edwards and Oracle’s Procurement Cloud to help them meet changing business needs. They were able to go live quickly, and more notably, they launched with no customizations.

Oracle’s JD Edwards team is continuing to build and deliver innovations. Quest continues to offer strategic and deep dive content and networking, at Oracle users’ conferences like Oracle OpenWorld and COLLABORATE, and online. Don’t miss our Oracle COLLABORATE conference, COLLABORATE 18, April 22-26, 2017, for the latest and greatest in JD Edwards functionalities and updates.