Thursday, June 30, 2005

OracleSoft

Somewhat reluctantly I'm picking up articles and doing research about the future of PeopleSoft now that it is in the hands of Oracle. As a PeopleSoft customer (HR and Financial apps), my operation has a vested interest in what happens. My reluctance to engage comes from the feeling I have that no matter what events transpire, an ugly conversion to something new is lurking out there somewhere. It will either be Oracle forcing us into their new Fusion product or looking at an offering from someone like Lawson or Microsoft (Great Plains).

None of this looks very promising to an operation that needs to conserve funds for projects that exhibit a payback. We're not leveraging PeopleSoft all that effectively today (I inherited this situation when I joined a little over a year ago), and putting a lot of time, effort, and expense into any replacement is just plain unattractive. We will be looking at alternatives such as TomorrowNow to supply third party maintenance, but the piper will have to be paid eventually.

In the meantime, I will continue to monitor what others are doing and planning for their PeopleSoft investments. Along with that I will continue to work on reducing the cost of ownership, squeezing out high-priced consultants and getting existing staff up to speed so we can handle more and more work ourselves. Fortunately, 2006 will be a "by year" for us, as we upgraded HR to 8.8 last year and will complete the Financials upgrade to 8.8 in October. That gives us time to work on acquiring needed skills as we plan for the future.