J.D. Edwards' Team Effort

J.D. Edwards has announced Team J.D. Edwards, a joint sales-and-delivery strategy that combines the consulting, education, and implementation support services of J.D. Edwards with its Consulting Alliances partners, including Accenture, Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, Deloitte & Touche, Hitachi Consulting, and IBM Business Consulting Services. J.D. Edwards' says the team approach is expected to combine its implementation expertise with its partners' services offerings, thus helping to identify and deliver optimum resources. "Customers demand options that allow them to choose the implementation approach that works best for them," Harry Debes, senior vice president, Americas, said in a statement. "Team J.D. Edwards brings our strengths together with those of our Alliance partners." Team J.D. Edwards is designed to enable Alliance partners to create stronger partnerships with both J.D. Edwards and the customers. Through collaboration with J.D. Edwards' consulting organization, Consulting Alliances partners can build valuable skills and expertise that best complement J.D. Edwards 5 products and services. This teaming approach between J.D. Edwards and its Alliance partners aims to create a methodology that focuses on the customer's business priorities. Through Team J.D. Edwards, the company and its partners should be able to quickly collaborate to deliver the solution that's right for the customer's needs in cost, predictable value, and solution fit. The company has already announced several Team J.D. Edwards customer go-lives, including F. Schumacher, Hill-Rom, and Organon. "The modularity of J.D. Edwards 5 and the Team J.D. Edwards approach creates an ideal implementation strategy for our company," Andre Duncan, CIO of F. Schumacher, said in a J.D. Edwards statement. "J.D. Edwards 5 allows us to pick those applications that we need now, with an eye toward what we might need down the road. By combining the expertise of J.D. Edwards and Hitachi Consulting, we're able to extract value from the applications more quickly and more efficiently, thus positively impacting our bottom line." In related news PeopleSoft has amended its original purchase offer for J.D. Edwards in a move it hopes will expedite the deal and thwart an Oracle takeover of PeopleSoft. Under the terms of the amended deal, PeopleSoft will pay $863 million in cash and issue 52.6 million shares, giving J.D. Edwards shareholders $7.05 plus 0.42 shares of PeopleSoft for each share of J.D. Edwards stock. J.D. Edwards shareholders will still have the option of accepting the original all-stock agreement of 0.86 PeopleSoft shares, the company says.