J.D. Edwards & Co. plans to offer its CRM applications running on the Linux operating system on IBM servers with IBM middleware.
JDE and IBM announced the new customer relationship management offering jointly this week at the Focus 2002 JDE user conference, in JDEs hometown, Denver. The first application for the open-source operating system is slated for the financial services industry.
The news followed another announcement from JDE this week that it was enhancing its broader suite of enterprise software with more business-to-business collaboration capabilities.
The J.D. Edwards CRM suite helps businesses harness information about their customers, and provides a single view of the customer. The enterprise resource planning software providers Linux based solutions will include IBMs DB2 database and WebSphere Application Server software for Linux, running on the IBM eServer xSeries, officials said.
Over the past several months, more and more customers have expressed interest in Linux-based solutions, according to Dave Siebert, group vice president at JDE, who said that partnering with IBM makes sense, as the Armonk, N.Y., company is emerging as a leader in Linux-based solutions.
IBM Global Services along with the consulting arm of JDE will provide installation and customization support for JDEs Linux-based CRM app for financial services, as well as for additional apps as theyre developed.
The Linux version of JDEs CRM package is due later this year.