Texas Thunder Drummers at JD Edwards FOCUS 2002

Can You Predict the Future? ... Imagine 8,000 people in one room banging on drums (think Stomp), celebrating an easy way for real estate enterprises to project future income for up to 15 years. Well, OK, I'm exaggerating. But there were almost 8,000 people in the room, and they were all banging drumsticks together. And some of them were real estate CIOs.

The scene was the opening session of FOCUS 2002, JD Edwards Annual Conference in Denver, CO. Publicly traded JD Edwards (NASDAQ: JDEC) sells almost $1 billion of enterprise management and supply chain software annually. Once a year JD Edwards and their customers gather together to exchange information. In fact, the conference is actually presented by Quest, the JD Edwards user group and not a shy crowd.

Andrew Rains, Real Estate Industry Manager, outlined JD Edwards' vision for future products and services to almost two hundred real estate customers. These are the information and technical specialists responsible for developing applications to make your businesses run smoother, and that frequently means dramatically speeding up the flow of information within your company.

So I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that these professionals would like JD Edwards software to do even more. For example, they'd like to avoid the hassle of exporting data on hundreds of properties and thousands of leases to standalone analysis programs or spreadsheets. That's why JD Edwards will soon offer its Advanced Real Estate Forecasting module. A REIT, for instance, could take its existing portfolio, make market assumptions about future rents and expenses, and forecast its income up to fifteen years in the future. ... Now if we could only figure out a way to predict rents 5, 10 or 15 years ahead.

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--Peter Pike