PeopleSoft has unveiled its latest range of application
hosting and management services.
PeopleSoft has also introduced service levels for all of its
hosted services, called "value", "enhanced" and "ultimate".
The plans offer varying customer-service response and up-time
guarantees, ranging from 99.5% promised availability for the value
plan through 99.9% availability for the ultimate plan.
The value plan is aimed at companies with less than $1bn in
annual revenue, while the ultimate plan is intended to support
large global organisations with thousands of employees, said Bill
Henry, vice-president of marketing and strategy for PeopleSoft
Global Services.
PeopleSoft offers application hosting services both directly and
through several resellers. The service-level plans apply only to
services purchased directly from PeopleSoft, Henry said.
Pricing varies widely, but Henry estimated that a simple, single
application hosting package would start around $10,000 per
month.
PeopleSoft is also now offering remote management for customers
that want to keep their applications and servers in their own
datacentres, providing them with maintenance such as applying
patches and database administration.
PeopleSoft's expansion of its hosting services comes amid growth
in the applications management market.
IDC forecasted that worldwide application management revenue
will grow to more than $20bn by 2007, from $12.1bn last year.
A number of small ASPs (application service providers) have been
winning business in the lower end of the CRM market from
traditional suppliers such as PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems, which
recently unveiled its own tailored hosted software service.
Companies are looking to avoid large up-front costs and improve
applications performance, while dealing with pared down IT staffs,
a combination of factors which will help drive the hosting market,
IDC said.
"We've seen a huge growth rate around hosting," Henry said.
PeopleSoft now has about 60 customers using its hosted services, he
said.
Unlike Siebel, though, PeopleSoft does not plan to create
lower-cost applications or services customised for hosting. While
the market segment is growing quickly, it remains a small
percentage of PeopleSoft's overall business.
Scarlett Pruitt writes for IDG News Service