interview with new ceo.
January 25, 1999
J.D. Edwards' new CEO Doug Massingill charts his company's ups and downs
By Stannie Holt
InfoWorld Electric
Long a sleeper in the market for enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, J.D. Edwards is looking for more of the limelight. The Denver-based company boasts a rapid growth rate, even as some of its competitors have struggled financially over the past year, and a successful transition from its AS/400 roots to other platforms and technologies. J.D. Edwards also has a new CEO, Doug Massingill, who took the reins from company founder Ed McVaney late last year. InfoWorld ERP Reporter Stannie Holt recently spoke to Massingill about the company and its ActivEra architecture, which will allow companies to react to business changes more quickly.
InfoWorld: What's the biggest challenge facing J.D. Edwards right now?
Massingill: I'd probably really focus on two issues. One, an internal issue and one, an external issue. Let's talk about the internal one first. All companies in this particular industry for application software must develop some level of personality, and that personality is really what keeps your people focused on attaining the mission. We're not companies -- and J.D. Edwards is certainly not [just] a company that's built on millions of dollars of capital assets.
We're built upon the strength of the personnel that we have working in this company. We're really nothing more than a very labor-intensive manufacturing company, and what we focus on at J.D. Edwards, from an internal point, is establishing and maintaining a very strong and very productive corporate culture. And from an internal challenge standpoint, that's a huge challenge that we have.
When we were a very small software company -- say 100 employees -- developing and maintaining a culture was not that difficult because you saw everybody every day. But once you're running a $950 million company, with offices all around the world, with 5,000 people, the maintenance of this particular culture is a huge effort that is required by all of the management team and all of the employees at J.D. Edwards.
InfoWorld: What's your external challenge?
Massingill: The challenge that we have right now is addressing the industry as it exists today. J.D. Edwards has been one of the few software companies that's ever been able to transform itself. We moved from being an AS/400-only vendor that addressed a specific set of customers in a specific market space. And what we've been able to do is transform our technology and transform our product line, and really transform our entire focus so that now we're addressing a much larger audience and marketplace with a very robust product.
Now, the challenge that we have right now is really meeting the needs of this new marketplace. And we think that the needs of this marketplace are changing very, very rapidly.
InfoWorld: You recently launched your ActivEra product architecture. What is your selling point against, let's say SAP or Oracle or PeopleSoft?
Massingill: I think that the focal point today in the marketplace is an issue of flexibility. What sets J.D. Edwards apart from this very strong competition is the fact that our product is going to remain a solution after it's been implemented. And the only way that that can happen is to make sure that you can react to these changing business environments and be as flexible as you possibly can. We see that what's happened, especially in the larger competitors, is that we put some very capable and very feature-rich systems in place, but they're not adapting themselves to the changing business climate.
Now we think that we can compete very effectively with a concept that we call "Idea to Action." And this is a focal point of our software that says that we ought to be able to enable action, like on new business ideas, and allow a customer to put that into an actionable state into the software.
We just went through a period of time in the 1990s that are really characterized as the decade of re-engineering. And re-engineering is a very good thing, but what it really focuses on is establishing a set of business practices that are static.
And we've seen this emergence of what has been called 'best business practices.' And those are very good, and for companies that have not been operating on a process-based model and really focused on these best business practices, that's a very good evolution.
But once you're there and once you have these business processes in place, the real, real focus of the industry and the software must be your ability to react to the marketplace and your ability to change after that point in time.
And it's really a focus in the future on what the next-best business practice is. It's been a quote that we recently got from Jack Welch at General Electric that says that if the rate of change inside your business is slower than the rate of change outside your business, then the end is near.
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