PeopleSoft aims to shift its customers away from a
point-solution focus toward a "total ownership" software
model.
The company will invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the
next few years to enhance server installation and to increase
automation and real-time updates, configuration, and integration to
reduce implementation and costs while boosting consistency within
the enterprise application lifecycle, said chief technology officer
Rick Bergquist.
"Enterprise applications need to step up [and] we’re ingraining
a new set of standards our developers have to cater to," said
Bergquist. "Customers want to do more with less. They want an
ownership experience that is more effective and better at the same
time."
Albert Pang, enterprise applications analyst at IDC, said the
enterprise application space is long overdue for a "pre-built
integration" overhaul, as users have complained about the lengthy
period required to install applications, implement upgrades, and
solve other support issues.
"Customers are sick and tired of spending too much of their
resources on integration and trying to figure out why it’s not
working with their existing systems," said Pang. "They don’t want
to get away from a preserved investment."
Although he termed the Total Ownership experience a step in the
right direction, Pang cautioned that the road
ahead would be littered with challenges.
"They are coming up with a lofty promise to help companies
reduce the reliance on middleware products, and that’s not going to
bode well for a lot of vendors including IBM, Oracle, Web Methods,
and even one of PeopleSoft's partners, BEA," he said.
Among the offerings unveiled at its 2003 Leadership Summit,
PeopleSoft announced its Performance-Driven Manufacturing
application suite. The suite comprises a manufacturing scorecard,
supply chain and predictive operations planning, and demand-driven
manufacturing running on top of a single enterprise performance
management platform.
