What is Oracle’s JD Edwards Mobile Strategy?
“Improving Business Results and the Complete Mobile Lifecycle with Low TCO.”
This is JD Edwards mobile strategy as announced at the annual partner summit in Denver this week. Having attended many sessions on mobile over the last four days, I will explain my understanding of that strategy.
Oracle has made their commitment to mobile very clear at InFocus in 2015 when they announced 80+ free mobile applications that work with JD Edwards out-of-the-box and downloadable from the App Stores. These applications are role-based, fit for purpose and built to take action at the point of process with simple, easy user interface, and are primarily focused on the field user. These applications are built using Mobile Application Framework, or MAF. They can be extended by altering the code (Mobile Application Archives) or new applications can be built from scratch using MAF.
So how many JDE mobile applications has Oracle delivered since InFocus 2015?
Less than 5.
You must be kidding.
Enter Mobile Application Accelerator.
Instead of building new applications for every use case, Oracle shifted their focus to building codeless tools for the business analysts to create their own mobile applications. Mobile Application Accelerator is one such tool that blew the audience away at the partner summit.
Mobile Application Accelerator (MAX) features include:
- Browser based development
- No coding required
- Easily map to business services
- Preview app in line
- Edit, test and publish from the browser
MAX is geared towards three specific personas.
- The Business Analyst an expert in specific functional areas can quickly build cross platform mobile apps for critical business flows (Citizen Developer)
- The Mobile Developer who is an expert at UI development can build re-usable assets (page and UI templates) for use with MAX
- The Mobile Admin who manages mobile developer accounts with platform vendors, coordinates mobile app development and distribution across the organization
An entire mobile application was built by the business analyst without writing any code in less than 30 minutes. Does that mean developers will be out of jobs? Of course not. Developers with knowledge of Java/JavaScript will continue to build the business services and more complex custom applications.
All this sounds great. The first part of the strategy “Improving business results” is seeming very real with simplified development tools. What is the catch? Total cost of ownership. The user of the mobile application should have license to the corresponding JD Edwards modules in order to use the mobile application. For example, previously, if a field workforce of 1,000 people using the paper process required only 5 users with JDE licenses in the back office to do their paperwork, the mobile field workforce will now need 1,000 JDE licenses — making mobile prohibitively expensive for most organizations with a large field workforce.
Introducing Oracle Mobile Cloud Services.
Oracle is addressing this issue by introducing “Mobile-Only License”. Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) is a new offering from Oracle that will be released shortly targeting the mobile-only user. Additionally, MCS includes a rich set of features like back end integration, federated identity, push notification, user management, analytics, diagnostics and storage. The value proposition as presented by Lyle Ekdahl is huge.
Oracle is forging forward on its JDE mobile strategy providing foundational, game-changing tools to make your JD Edwards investment worthwhile.
What is your mobile strategy?
Join us on February 24th to learn more about mobilizing your own enterprise with “Top 5 Strategy Considerations to Achieve Predictable Results”.