The Bloor Perspective: A citizens' database, JD Edwards and corporate PDA support

In the aftermath of 11 September Larry Ellison was one of the first on his feet to offer Oracle's assistance in setting up a federal ID database. In his keynote speech at OpenWorld, he confirmed Oracle's 9i database software has been delivered to certain security agencies free of charge.

Oracle is leaving itself open to criticism - agencies will have to stump up for annual maintenance and upgrades - but that apart, the idea is one that has been discussed at some length over the last 12 weeks.

How much should we citizens give up in terms of personal freedom in order to ensure the overall safety of our societies? What Larry has suggested is quite simple. A simple database that allows individuals to be identified in terms of their social security ID and fingerprints. Thus, as we board an aeroplane we hand over our ID and match the fingerprint to that stored with our records.

Of course it would work but the problem would come with getting everybody to participate. While Oracle is talking of government agencies sharing information and developing national standards for identification records human rights activists are shouting about individual rights and 'Big Brother'.

The really interesting thing is that if we can just get over this hurdle and start to accept that we should give a little of our private information for the better good of us all, then the gates are open for a world of convenience. Larry wouldn't need to give away his database because we could all carry smartcards with our fingerprints embedded into them.

We could use them to spend money, gain access to our buildings, operate mobile phones (most of us are known by our phone numbers anyway) and a whole host of filofax-style activities.

Smartcards could also maintain our life preferences - contact information, organ donor preferences, whether or not we want to receive junk mail. All we have to do is plug them into the systems to make things happen. Ultimately, if we are not breaking the law, why should we have anything to hide? A small leap of faith could give us all so much more.

*JD Edwards on the up*

Life is not all doom and gloom. Down at JD Edwards, everything seems to be going swimmingly as the supply chain and ERP solutions provider has just turned in fourth quarter results that beat Wall Street's expectations by some distance, turning what was a pretty flat year, financially, into a pretty good final result.

Overall, the figures were slightly down on the previous year but still pretty much in line with revised estimates. Q4 figures showed a profit of $20.4m on revenues of $253.4m. This compares with revenue figures from the same quarter in 2000 of $277.2m. For the full year, the profit figure came out at $20.3m (up from $4.9m) on revenues of $874m - down from $1bn last year.

The improved fortunes have been accredited to a cost-cutting campaign that has included a significant reduction in headcount and the consolidation of office space, and some very aggressive sales activity. Expenses have been cut by just under $200m. A high proportion of income comes from services - more than two-thirds - and this is one area where it has increased its revenues from the previous year.

These figures do not include any reference to the acquisition of YouCentric, and its CRM hopes. This is probably a part of what CEO, Ed McVaney, called a "genuine pent-up demand" for its products and indicated that business should continue along similar lines as long as the general economy holds out during 2002.

As a part of its more aggressive sales strategy, JD Edwards is targeting a number of vertical markets. Already, there are solutions for electronics, manufacturing and construction and the company expects to add automotive and life sciences verticals in the near future.

This is yet another example of a business cutting its cloth according to its pocket. Possibly with some good fortune, it appears that JD Edwards had started to put its house in order before any of the events of September and so has actually seen some improvement in its trading results during a period that has been very weak for the majority. With the "pent-up demand" that exists, we would hope to see continuing performance improvements.

*Corporate support ready for PDAs?*

In most organisations there are many people making use of PDAs. It is possible to see more than half a dozen varieties of electronic organisers on display in a single meeting. Devices from Compaq, HP, Palm, Psion, Sony and Visor abound.

The capabilities of these handheld machines vary enormously but all provide diary, contact and task management while most offer the ability to read and send email. The ability to work on word processing documents and spreadsheets is also common nowadays.

Despite this widespread usage, most organisations do not have formal support processes in place or guidelines on usage. More worryingly still, most businesses do not have plans for how such technologies can be exploited to become effective components that add real business value.

However, there have been developments that now allow businesses to make effective use of PDA technologies. Chief among these has been the rapid advance in synchronisation software and the creation of tools capable of managing and supporting these devices effectively and economically.

A lot of development is taking place in extending the capabilities of the synchronisation software to include the ability to recognise significant updates in centrally held data and then push notification of the updated data out to users. The monitoring and notification of the changes can be managed centrally by an organisation but can be further customised by individual users. With these capabilities it is now possible to incorporate the use of PDAs in corporate workflow systems as key elements in business processes.

Pumatech is one company at the vanguard of looking at new ways to exploit PDAs in business offering a set up replacing the manual completion of paper forms, the use of snail mail to send the forms into the office and the associated manual re-entry of the data into the appropriate corporate application.

In some ways Pumatech now offers products that compete in the PDA space with components of middleware applications offered by companies such as IBM and HP, taking it beyond its traditional competitors, AvantGo and Extended Systems.

It will be an interesting 12 months as companies look at ways of making use of PDAs in a controlled, managed fashion.