Lyle Eckdahl and other Oracle executives opened INFOCUS 2018 with a keynote presentation on Continuous Innovation and trending topics on the JD Edwards ERP platform.

The presentation can be viewed here.  (After a short video, the presentation begins around 1:30.)

Oracle customers, consulting firms and consultants all are interested in where things are going with JD Edwards.  I would encourage you to watch the video for yourself, but here are some of my takeaways from this presentation.

• Oracle has announced a “Continuous Innovation Model” for JD Edwards.  There are no announced future releases of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne after 9.2.  (Lyle pointed out that future releases - including "version X" - may be in planning, but not publicly announced.)  Instead, Oracle will continuously improve 9.2 through smaller updates, typically released every year or so.  Ideally, this will provide users with more functionality without the expense of taking on a major upgrade.
• EnterpriseOne 9.2 will be supported by Oracle until at least 2030.  Does this mean Oracle will no longer support 9.2 at that point?  No, according to Lyle, this is just what is the announced support plan as of today.  Moreover, there surely will be other Partners in the JDE marketplace who will offer this service (as they currently do for earlier release levels) if Oracle opts out.  Does this mean the JDE line will end in 2030?  No, he suggested the retirement of a software like this takes much longer, and that is not the plan.
• Clearly, Oracle is recommending your best ROI is in upgrading to E1 9.2 as the majority of R&D will be poured into this release. Two interesting slides were the mix of World and EnterpriseOne accounts and their various release levels - one year ago and today.  One year ago, almost half of all JDE customers were running E1 9.1.  Now, almost half are running 9.2  The idea that customers aren’t upgrading is false,  as soon more than half of all JD Edwards customers will be on the latest release.