Banishing some PeopleSoft Myths July 28, 2016

There seems to be quite a bit of uncertainty and misinformation in the PeopleSoft marketplace currently, so I thought it might be time to banish a few myths:

1. PeopleSoft isn’t being improved/getting investment

There are those with vested interests or other biases that will always deny this regardless of the evidence put in front of them, but PeopleSoft is improving in leaps and bounds. In the last couple of years PeopleSoft has been moving at an increasing speed, and one of the biggest questions on many client’s minds right now is “how do I keep up”. My Cedar colleague Graham Smith has a long list of recent new features in his PeopleSoft Predictions 2016 post, but if you just counted Fluid, Selective Adoption and Cloud Delivery Architecture I don’t think there’s ever been a time in which PeopleSoft has improved so much in a short space of time, pre or post-acquisition. Paco has repeatedly committed to keeping PeopleSoft around until at least 2027, and using the last few years as evidence I’m inclined to believe him.

2. PeopleSoft is Legacy/Old Fashioned

PeopleSoft is certainly very well established, with a long history and a wide customer base, that much is true. This can be a good thing, in that much of the system is tried and tested with the wrinkles ironed out. It is also true that some aspects of PeopleSoft do things the ‘old way’. The majority of deployments are on-premises, without the flexibility and efficiency that cloud deployment and automation can bring. You also pay for PeopleSoft up-front, rather than monthly. It doesn’t have to be this way, however. PeopleSoft can be deployed in an agile and efficient manner, taking advantage of some of the new technology available to us now, and the new enhancements within the product.

3. To be a future-proof system it needs to be SaaS

This is tricky as different people hold varying ideas about what constitutes SaaS, however PeopleSoft does get regular updates containing new functionality from the vendor (every ~10 weeks), can be deployed in the Cloud (to gain auto-scaling/elasticity of resources, a predictable monthly subscription and theoretically even multi-tenancy – at least above the database-level, if it was something that clients wanted). Furthermore, the application of the updates and the management of the cloud architecture can be handed over to a friendly partner in order to get even closer to purists’ definitions of what SaaS entails – if that is important to you.

4. PeopleSoft’s UI is out-dated

Up until a few years ago there wasn’t the focus on ‘consumer grade UI’ that there is now. In that era, PeopleSoft’s UI measured up pretty well. It was certainly more attractive than SAP and/or E-Business Suite. Recently this greater focus on the User Interface has introduced new competitors but PeopleSoft still keeps up well. Of course you can compare an old version of PeopleSoft with the latest from a competitor and it will appear dated in comparison, however if you use the latest PeopleSoft UI in the comparison it’ll fare rather better. The Fluid UI is (at least) the equal of anything out there, regardless of which device you view it on.

5. The PeopleSoft Market is Quiet

From what I can see there are fewer green-field implementations than 5 years ago, but there is a lot more upgrade activity. Clients are moving to 9.2 at a far greater rate than for 9.0 or 9.1, and then starting initiatives to really get value from the software once they get there. As a company I’m not sure Cedar has ever been busier.

So, now I’ve got that off my chest, I might do some predictions like Graham next …