PeopleSoft Tipster

There’s a good summary post on Oracle and how they’re far more secretive about their products than PeopleSoft ever used to be.  The post deals with Fusion, but I think that the same point applies to many products, including PeopleSoft applications and Tools releases.  Even tools patches have very vague release dates.

When I posted a year or so ago that I’d heard Jesper Andersen say that the Fusion Applications suite wouldn’t GA until 2009 there was a fair bit of feedback (to put it politely – I even had to edit one comment for profanity), but now it seems more likely that Jesper was correct.

How much we read into this Gartner report is up to our own faith in Oracle, but statements like

‘Oracle plans to only sell Fusion to new customers and that “migrating the installed base to Fusion is no longer a near-term goal”.’

and

‘the 2008 Fusion applications will not include any core ERP products’

don’t fill me with confidence that we’ll see clients implementing Fusion any time soon.

It’s great news though for anyone hoping that the PeopleSoft product line remains around for a long time.

On the same day as Sun’s purchase of MySQL, it seems Oracle has finally managed to purchase BEA for $8.5 billion. Not as much as BEA wanted, but more than Oracle’s ‘highest offer’.

Press Release on Yahoo News

“The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle’s Fusion middleware software suite,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle Fusion middleware has an open “hot-pluggable” architecture that allows customers the option of coupling BEA’s WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite. That’s just one example of how customers can choose among Oracle and BEA middleware products, knowing that those products will gracefully interoperate and be supported for years to come.”

This is probably going to be a bit wordy, but here’s a quick overview of the sessions I attended at the UKOUG held in Birmingham a week or two ago.

I attended the following:

• Synchronous Messaging and Web Services in PeopleTools 8.48
• Getting a file into PeopleSoft for processing
• Developing a strategy for PeopleSoft Global Payroll bundles
• Operational Excellence with PeopleSoft Version Control
• PeopleSoft Application Classes – Easing the Path to Fusion

(more…)

According to the Oracle Apps User Group, we won’t see the first version of Fusion until 2009 (edit: the validity of this statement has been questioned, read the comments below for more). How many companies then purchase version 1 is another question, but it really is starting to seem as though Fusion is a long, long way off.

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/12/11/oracle_fusion_delivery_2009/

Not being n Oracle Apps person, I’m not sure what the absence of mod_plsql in Fusion means … with PL/SQL being Oracle only, could it be a pointer that Fusion is going to be database-independent after all?

Finally, is the reliance on Java and XML going to leave us with a product that’s a real drain on hardware? John Stouffer (co-chairman of the OAUG’s Fusion Council) recently warned of exponential database growth.

Interesting …

I’m off to the UK Oracle User Group tomorrow, but here’s a quick survey conducted on UKOUG attendees in the meantime:

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/12/03/oracle_uk_users_survey/ 

Apparently “Customers’ opinion of Oracle’s licensing has hit a new low in the UK while the company’s Fusion plans remain a mystery to half of its users”.

The good news is that satisfaction with PeopleSoft is still very high (up to 75%).

From Oracle Open World 2007:

It seems as though the first applications out of the Fusion stable are all going to be CRM related. According to Larry’s keynote, the first three will be sales prospector, sales references and sales tools.

Possibly of more interest was that we’ve had a glimpse of an answer to the ‘what database platforms will Fusion support’ question. It turns out that it’s going to vary for each application. Larry spoke about Financials and said that it’s going to be Oracle, plus DB2 (providing IBM build in some features that Oracle are requesting). There was no word on the other modules.

The best exchange was possibly this one though:

“We will have a Fusion version for every application,” Ellison stated. “So you’re moving off these brands (PeopleSoft, Siebel etc)?” he was asked, LArry responded “No, well yes – by 2025.”

Article here:
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/11/15/ellison_audience_smack_down/

There are rumours of hold-ups and delays within the Fusion camp.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that the ‘Head of Fusion’ John Wookey left amidst talk of a fall-out with Larry Ellison.  Apparently “Oracle was trying to woo him back, though the circumstances around Wookey’s departure have not been confirmed.“

Now it appears that there is some backtracking – or at least redefining phrases from earlier statements – to allow for delays in the release.  Seeing as we are only a couple of months away from the New Year, surely a release date a little more precise than between Jan 1st and Dec 31st 2008 should be possible?

It’s not as if we expect the full suite of Apps on that date.  I would anticipate something more akin to the PeopleSoft Version 9.0 release, where a smallish module (was it ELM?) came out first with much fanfare about ‘Oracle meeting schedules to release PeopleSoft v9.0′, and then the main modules (HR, Financials etc) drip-fed out months later.

What is Project X?

There’s been a bit of talk today about Oracle’s Project X. It’s been bubbling around for a while, but now it has been officially announced as ‘Oracle Application Integration Architecture’ and – to paraphrase – it’s a method of joining together disparate ERP systems.

By purchasing Process Integration Packs (PIPs) clients will be able to connect systems – initially I’d imagine it would be PeopleSoft, Oracle e-Biz, Siebel and JDE, but other systems will no doubt be added in the fullness of time. This is, of course, a high visibility use of the much heralded SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) – one of the buzzwords you can’t avoid hearing in any Fusion discussion. I guess this is Oracle responding to customers saying ‘enough with the SOA/BPEL/XMLP tub-thumping, show me how it improves my business’.

What does it mean for PeopleSoft people?

Whenever Oracle come out with a big announcement, the first question for me is always ‘what does this mean for the PeopleSoft world’? After all, straight after the takeover Oracle announced that we’d all be forced to migrate to Fusion. Then we were going to be temporarily supported on our current ERPs before migrating. Next came Applications Unlimited, meaning we could hold fire a bit longer. Now, Oracle release a technology enabling us to not migrate to Fusion at all, but stay put and let the different ERPs communicate.

A cynic might wonder if they were having problems with Fusion. Or perhaps it’s all going swimmingly but they’re hearing that clients quite like their current systems and don’t want to move? Or are they just after the extra revenue stream PIP sales would bring before Fusion comes along?