JD. Edwards provide innovative, full range business solutions for multinational organizations for almost a quarter of a century. Its innovative approach allowed it to act as a true business partner with companies of all sizes, leveraging their existing investments and taking advantage of new technologies thereby increasing their competitive advantage. 80 international offices are maintained to support an ever-expanding customer base of more than 6200 installations distributed among 113 countries. J. D. Edwards also helped to shape the next phase of e-business in the Internet economy: collaborative commerce (C-Commerce).
C-Commerce is the ability to deliver open, collaborative technologies that facilitate communication among organizations, suppliers and customers across a supply chain, maximizing value in business-to-business environments. J. D. Edwards has over 80 product alliance partners, leading to a myriad of platform variations in implementing their business solutions. Providing a means for its international sales force to demonstrate their range of applications in ways that emulate the diverse environments of its customers was a formidable and costly challenge.
As with most dynamic international organizations, J. D. Edwards has a continually expanding internal requirement for collaborative and business process applications. A number of pending application initiatives meant that the wide area network infrastructure would require expansion. Reducing the network overhead of bandwidth hungry client/server applications could allay costly link upgrades. J. D. Edwards operates a tiered IT administration architecture. The primary IT expertise and 7×24 support services are concentrated at the corporate headquarters in Denver. Administrators are stationed at larger hub sites and also support smaller satellite offices.
These regional administrators incur significant travel expense when server console access is required at the satellite locations. Solutions J. D. Edwards implemented Windows 2000 Terminal Services to provide single instance delivery of its business applications integrated within a wide variety of client environments. Their centralized Windows 2000 terminal servers now provide product demonstration capabilities for an international sales force of 300, highlighting an array of product integration capabilities. Centralizing these complex client scenarios significantly reduced the ongoing support and management of the sales systems.
Prior to setting up Windows 2000 terminal servers, demos were being run by individual sales people on their own laptops, they would demo multiple versions of the software by having multiple hard drives. That was a lot of administration overhead. Deployment of the constant stream of application updates was also greatly simplified. When there are new versions of client software they’re very easy to deploy. J. D. Edwards also deployed Terminal Services as a delivery platform for a bandwidth hungry client/server application.
With several new initiatives on the horizon, J. D. Edwards faced the need for bandwidth upgrades for many of its wide area network (WAN) links. They have software that has some pretty high bandwidth requirements if run from a client in a standard client/server fashion across our WAN. JD Edwards placed the client application on terminal servers running locally in our corporate network and users throughout the world can access those servers. It really reduces our bandwidth requirement. We’d much rather have a thousand terminal server users connecting over our WAN than have the same number of traditional client/server connections.
The 1,200 users who access Terminal Services hosted applications over the wide area network have experienced significant performance improvements. Before they were just running applications locally and dealing with response time issues . Mobile access has also improved. With client/server applications there is a lot of synchronization that occurs when you have a mobile user dialing in. Even with careful planning and extensive testing requirements, the terminal service platforms were fully deployed within six months.
And familiarity with the Windows 2000 Server platform meant there was little requirement for additional training in implementing Terminal Services. The remote administration capabilities provided by Terminal Services have provided travel savings for IT administrators servicing satellite offices. Remote administration mode has been enabled on all of J. D. Edwards’ Windows 2000-based servers. From the remote administration side they did not have to hire new staff while the complexity of the environment might have indicated that they did need extra staff, they didn’t because of the remote administration capabilities.
