The company plans to sell its J.D. Edwards 5 application suite pre-integrated with IBM's middleware, which includes WebSphere Application Server and Portal with embedded security, Lotus collaboration tools, and DB2 Universal Database. J.D. Edwards 5 comprises CRM, ERP, Supply Chain Management, Supplier Relationship Management, and Business Intelligence applications.

The software suite, to be jointly sold by J.D, Edwards and IBM, will run on all vendor technologies that J.D. Edwards currently supports, including Microsoft Windows, UNIX environments from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Unisys, and the IBM eServer iSeries.

J.D. Edwards will continue to offer customers integration and interoperability via its XPI (eXtended Process Integration) solution using webMethods technologies. J.D. Edwards and IBM support Web services and the open Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard for e-commerce.

Officials at J.D. Edwards say the move was fueled by requests from mid-market customers who were looking to remove the obstacle to rapid application deployment. J.D. Edwards' open standards--based business applications running on IBM's open infrastructure technology will enable customers to develop and implement solutions for managing a broad array of enterprise business processes quickly.

The benefits of reduced cost, ease of implementation, and application portability achieved through open standards are important to all customers but especially for those in the mid-market, which have limited IT resources.

"This pre-integrated package of open J.D. Edwards software and IBM infrastructure technology will enable us to get to the application functionality and business process benefits much faster, with less time and money spent on integration," said Grant Schwartz, vice president, Information Technology, Katz Pharmacy Services Inc. "This combination is 'one-stop-shopping' for open applications and infrastructure technology, with pre-integrated simplicity for customer implementations."

J.D. Edwards and IBM will share sales leads and develop joint marketing programs in support of the integrated software and infrastructure technology package, with J.D. Edwards delivering it in phases beginning in early 2003. In addition, J.D. Edwards and IBM are establishing an Integration Center to validate and certify various J2EE-compliant hardware configurations of the collaborative business software and infrastructure technology offerings.