JD Edwards announces record results as it bags SAP director

Aggressive growth by enterprise software vendor JD Edwards (JDE) saw it post a record first quarter and poach SAP's communications director in the same week.

Trevor Salomon will quit SAP after three years to become JDE's UK and Northern Europe marketing manager, once he has served his three-month notice period, largely by working from home.

He becomes the second senior SAP executive to leave for JDE this year following the departure of alliance program manager Tim Lennard in January.

Both companies denied the departures were related.

'It was too good an opportunity for me to refuse,' Salomon said. 'It's the new challenge that motivates me - and not the money.'

Meanwhile, JDE posted 25% annual growth in turnover for the first quarter of this year - up to a record $122.8m (#75.8m) from $98m a year ago. The UK division posted about 10% of the total.

Continuing rapid growth is widely predicted as the company begins to sell its recently launched OneWorld client-server product. Historically, JDE's sales have been based around its AS/400-based World Software product.

Jyoti Bannerjee, managing director at Tate Bramald Consulting, said: 'Our research has found that JDE's users are the happiest around. They are certainly far happier than SAP users. And with OneWorld there is finally a product to match SAP's R/3.'

But Salomon avoided a direct comparison. 'SAP will continue to be a huge success,' he said. 'JD Edwards' focus must be on the companies it should be beating, such as SSA, JBA and Software2000, not on who it would like to be beating.'

SAP has received Back Office certification from Microsoft for its R/3 enterprise resource planning applications.