Though the company's results were better than expected, J.D. Edwards and its rivals have suffered in recent quarters as a result of the overall downturn in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software market. ERP companies in recent months have been scrambling to reposition their offerings for the Internet as their profits have sagged.
SAP, for one, in October reported pretax profit declined 64 percent to $85.14 million, while operating profit fell 59 percent to $8.37 million. Meanwhile, Dutch business software firm Baan in October reported a larger than expected third-quarter loss as sales of new software dropped sharply, sending its shares down more than 10 percent. Oracle, with a core database business, is one of the few ERP software makers to evade large losses
