J.D. Edwards & Co. Monday said its acquisition of YOUcentric Inc. is complete, and the first fruits of the union are fit for consumption.
Last summer J.D. Edwards announced its plans to acquire customer relationship management (CRM) vendor YOUcentric in a cash and stock deal worth US$86 million.
Like its enterprise resource planning (ERP) rivals Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft Inc. and SAP AG, J.D. Edwards is looking to grab a share of the CRM software market, which Gartner Inc. estimates will grow from $5.65 billion in 2001 to $7.92 billion in 2002.
J.D. Edwards CRM 1.0 ties the features of YOUcentric's Java-based YOUrelate suite - which includes sales force automation, contact center, customer service and marketing apps - to J.D. Edwards' flagship ERP suite, OneWorld.
The integration depends on J.D. Edwards' Extended Process Integration (XPI) middleware, which serves as a message broker and transports transactions from application to application.
In the past, J.D. Edwards has used XPI to customize business-to-business transactions within supply chain and ERP systems, the company says. For CRM 1.0, J.D. Edwards will ship the software with XPI adapters so users can connect the made-over YOUcentric apps to their own ERP or supply chain applications.
This is just the first phase of product integration, according to J.D. Edwards. The company says it will tie the new CRM suite to its demand planning, order promising and order configurator tools in releases due out next year.