Advice on systems consolidation

Hi All!

Need some top level opinions regarding a big project for us.

Current situation:
-JDE 8.0
-4 Separate AS400 machines one in every country
-Citrix for presentation

Where we want to go:
-JDE 9.1
-1 Centralized machine

My first general questions / thoughts:

The year is 2012. Nobody can predict the future but i would like to make a consolidation with my options for the future open.

-Should i use Citrix to present JDE to the users? its a native-web app, so why use citrix?
-Should i opt for AS400 or go for AIX/Oracle for example or Linux/Oracle?

I know that this is a project that will take months only to design it but i want to know what is the "feeling" today on 2012 regarding these.

Thanks guys.

[ QUOTE ]
Hi All!

Need some top level opinions regarding a big project for us.

Current situation:
-JDE 8.0
-4 Separate AS400 machines one in every country
-Citrix for presentation

Where we want to go:
-JDE 9.1
-1 Centralized machine

My first general questions / thoughts:

The year is 2012. Nobody can predict the future but i would like to make a consolidation with my options for the future open.

-Should i use Citrix to present JDE to the users? its a native-web app, so why use citrix?
-Should i opt for AS400 or go for AIX/Oracle for example or Linux/Oracle?

I know that this is a project that will take months only to design it but i want to know what is the "feeling" today on 2012 regarding these.

Thanks guys.

[/ QUOTE ]

First piece of advice, find a good business partner to help you plan out your upgrade. They can help you develop a roadmap for the upgrade, and business partners are the experts in the field of doing the actual jde upgrade, that's a specialized area of expertise.

As for specifics, you won't need citrix for your presentation layer. JDE 9.1 is a web app. As long as you have a fairly standardized set of browsers, you can take citrix out of the equation.

There are a lot of factors to consider when it comes to choosing your hardware/OS/database component. That is an area that a good business partner can guide you through. One piece of advice that you will often see offered from this forum is to consider the knowledge and expertise of your IT staff. Your company already knows the 400 and JDE 9.1 runs quite well on it. The 400 is here for the long haul, so that should be weighed in your decision making process.

Someone else on a different conversation thread this week made an erronious statement that they should go with Oracle as a database back end because Oracle was going to drop MS SQL. As stated in that thread, Oracle is committed to keeping JDE an open and flexible platform.

Spend some quality time up front planning out your strategy (it sounds like you are doing that now). Spend some money on a good business partner to help you with your plan. That will be some Euros well spent. Good Luck with your upgrade.

- Gregg

Regarding Citrix I don't think it is a bad idea at all to consider publishing IE or whatever browser you want to use through Citrix for the use of JDE. It makes it much easier to control plug-ins and tool bars that people may install at other locations that you can't control. JDE can go crazy when tool bars installed especially. We use Citrix to publish IE because some of our remote locations do what they want with their PC environment so it makes it much easier for us to support.

As for the AS400, if you already have the expertise in house and have not had any significant issues running your current environments on it then I would stay put for the same reasons Gregg mentioned. Stick with what you already know instead of reinventing the wheel.

Hi,
We went through a similar exercise recently.

We had 2 instances of JDE one on 9.0 and one on 8.12 on completely different hardware. We consolidate, not without pain to a single central JDE system on Linux/Oracle with WebLogic.

We now have
1 set of central objects, OL, Versions, System
Individual set of Data and combined set of control tables.

Here are some of what I don’t like necessarily, with going with Linux we have to many enterprise servers, with Power 7 AS/400 we could have eliminated this. We also have combined Control table, if you are separating Business Data why combine Control tables. If you use languages that is something that should be considered and if you have objects that are named the same but do different things in different locations that will be an area of concern.

Like previously recommended get with a few very good business partners, their CNC/technical knowledge has to be very strong and ask tons of questions.