As I sat down to write this article, I thought back to how long I’ve known JDA. I can’t attest that I’ve attended Focus, JDA’s user conference, for ten years, but I have certainly known the company as a retail analyst for that long. I haven’t always agreed with the directions JDA has taken over the years, and I confess that I haven’t always understood exactly the vision they were operating against. However, past aside, I feel like I finally get it.

It began two years ago when the company started talking about its web services in the context of enabling its version-locked installed base to get on an upgrade path without triggering an entire system selection process. Along with that message, JDA started talking about total cost of ownership and how the burden of integration shouldn’t be on the retailer – it should be on the vendor. Very encouraging stuff to hear.

And while a lot of people scratched their heads (myself included, at first) at the i2 acquisition, at last year’s Focus, JDA had a clearly expressed vision for how the acquisition would accelerate and enhance its move to a web services-enabled, on-demand delivery transformation.

This year, that transformation is nearly complete. New capabilities – for example, a lifecycle approach to fulfillment that seamlessly leverages capabilities from both assortment and replenishment – demonstrate that, in many areas, JDA is ready to move from assimilating past acquisitions to leveraging those acquired capabilities in new and innovative ways.

So then how does RedPrairie fit into all of this? Well, first, it’s not nearly as much of an overlap as past acquisitions. And with the foundation of on-demand solutions already in place, JDA’s acquisition offers an opportunity to accelerate the plans that RP already had in place.

But honestly, RedPrairie is not the heart of JDA’s story. I don’t want to minimize the significance of the acquisition, but what’s more important to me is the fact that JDA really does want to change the world – or at a minimum change the way that retailers buy and use software. You may hear JDA talk about cloud computing, and the importance of mobility, and a focus on user experience. But what that really means isn’t a collection of buzzwords. They are well down the road in transforming the purchase of enterprise software into the equivalent of opening an account on salesforce.com. They never want to see a customer face a version-locked implementation ever again, and are determined to get to a point where “upgrades” happen monthly, seamlessly.

There are a couple of significant implications that come from this strategy. One, corporate IT becomes something totally different. Gone are the hardcore tech guys, replaced by essentially super-users that are “application managers”. Gone are point-to-point integrations that make upgrades difficult and expensive. It’s the kind of transformation that is so huge that traditional corporate IT departments will resist it with every fiber of their being. A CIO who would embrace the nature of change that JDA is proposing is also embracing cutting about 75% of his or her staff, leaving only strategy, finance, a handful of architects, and business analysts on staff. The rest aren’t needed – because of “the cloud”. That’s a brave CIO, indeed.

I’m not saying it won’t happen. JDA already has customers like True Religion willing to get up on stage in main-event sessions and talk about how they’ve done exactly that. And I’m not saying it shouldn’t happen – I firmly believe that retailers are getting to a point where their existing IT infrastructure is preventing them from taking advantage of needed new capabilities, and that old ways of thinking – long release cycles and point-to-point integration – keep them locked out of future opportunities. Retail IT needs to embrace the internet age. But saying that and watching it happen are two completely different things, and I worry that JDA’s biggest challenge is not its vision, or its capabilities – but a lack of vision and capabilities on the part of its prospects and installed base.

With all of this as context, I believe that the company sits at a crossroads. Two of them, in fact.

The first crossroads centers on the customer data element. JDA currently bills itself as “The Supply Chain Company” – in part, as CEO Hamish Brewer half-joked at Focus, because they haven’t come up with a pithy catch-phrase that accurately describes what they really are now. Oracle and SAP have already made significant moves around embracing “customer ” as a data element that needs to be incorporated into all solution areas. With the RP assets (namely, loyalty and clienteling), JDA now has the beginnings of customer. Will it transform itself to embrace customer as part of its solutions? That remains to be seen.

The second crossroad focuses on commerce. With the i2 acquisition, JDA ended up with, of all things, an eCommerce platform. However, with RedPrairie, JDA’s commerce capabilities received a significant injection of new life. Clienteling and call center capabilities both play roles here, along with a “better” eCommerce platform and a strategy that RP had already begun to pursue that put a lot more emphasis on commerce capabilities. JDA, like SAP and Oracle before it, now has all of the pieces and parts to transform how retailers engage with customers – what our survey takers have pretty passionately embraced as “a single customer interaction platform”. Even though JDA’s competitors theoretically have a head start in enabling this platform, the reality is that JDA could still move fast enough to be the first to deliver a truly converged commerce platform that crosses channels. If they choose to pursue it – which is not currently a certainty.

Here’s the thing. Cloud, the way that JDA has implemented it, enables some remarkable things. I get the sense that JDA feels like it could be the “supply chain cloud,” and leave Finance and CRM and even commerce to some degree to others. JDA doesn’t need those capabilities – it just needs a clean web services call to reach those capabilities. I get it. But as much as cloud capabilities are transforming the way that JDA delivers software, “customer” is transforming the way that retailers think about supply chain. Customer data isn’t going to be a simple call to a loyalty program. It’s going to be integral to merchandise & assortment planning, to allocation, to fulfillment options and how those options are ultimately presented to the customer.

And retailers aren’t thinking about the future of POS in terms of “transactions”. They’re thinking about how to get more capabilities into store associates’ hands (places where JDA’s mobile and user experience strategies could become key), and the transaction itself is an afterthought. I can see a future where 80-90% of “point of sale” is actually a combination of supply chain and customer-related capabilities. And the remaining 10% is order management, complicated in the store only by the need to take cash. In JDA’s shoes, I would not be willing to let the market evolve to where I have to fight and compete for the 90% because I didn’t want to deal with the other 10% – especially when a 100% offering would overnight transform the market.

But none of this speculation would be possible if it wasn’t for what JDA has already accomplished. The company really is trying to change the world of enterprise software. They’ve seen the future and the entire company is bent towards making it a reality. It’s a future that retail needs.