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Product Update: PeopleSoft 9.1 Talent Management I’ve pulled the original post while discussions are underway with Oracle to address their specific concerns about its completeness, correctness and factual basis.
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Wondering if Oracle ever responded? We are doing an analysis of whether to spend consulting dollars on improving our TAM system from 8.9 to 9.1 versus going with Taleo or SuccessFactors. Would be nice to see the original post.
[…] Bloom, one of the world’s thought leading HR specialists recently pulled the text of a post she wrote about PeopleSoft 9.1 Talent Management. She said: I’ve pulled the original post while discussions are underway with Oracle to address […]
I think one strong point of PeopleSoft is forgotten in this discussion and that is how easy and quickly you can build customizations in PeopleTools, and how well the upgrade tools support bringing these customizations to a newer version. SaaS vendor’s will never be able to satisfy all functional and regional needs of bigger international companies, and are mandated to stay away from customer specific customizations as much as possible to keep their product manageable and suitable to all their customers.
There has always been a large focus on keeping your applications as “vanilla” as possible to simplify each upgrade and keep upgrade costs down. With the PeopleSoft capabilities mentioned above I would claim that the strength of PeopleSoft lies in being able to easily customize the system to the customers’ business needs, without suffering headaches in the upgrade efforts.
Until Oracle is able to fully mimic these strengths of PeopleTools in the Fusion developer tools (which they have seen to be more challenging than expected) I believe PeopleSoft is here to stay for a while.
No need to panic, YET. I have an alternative view on this being a Peoplesoft technical consultant for at least 14 years on various disciplines included in HRMS, Financials and CRM.
Technically, Peoplesoft continues to incorporate in its technical infrastructure, the latest technologies on the simplest ERP development platform and system. What this means to current and future licensees is that Oracle/Peoplesoft seems to continue to provide all the tools for any customer to develop their own home grown customizations or add-ons to the main Peoplesoft environment.
So, although I might agree that Oracle is still looking at Fusion to replace a lot of their current ERP suites, in the meantime, the technology behind Peoplesoft is still leading edge and any customer with the funds to create any new functionality under the sun should be able to develop it effectively and efficiently with Peoplesoft technology.
The key is getting seasoned consultants to help them map things out.
I don’t know if it was your intention to do so, but what you’ve described is the need to hire seasoned (translate: with solid hourly/daily rates) consultants to develop customizations and add-ons, something that many CIOs would prefer not to do. Instead, they would like to have much more and more frequent non-disruptive functionality upgrades to obviate the need for such customizations and add-ons and with a wide range of configurations that can be done by business analysts. When PeopleSoft came to market, it was with the promise that business people could extend the software without programmer intervention. That truly was a major part of the sales pitch. Hmmmm….
Naomi, I totally agree that many customers are looking for software that adds business value out-of-the-box! There is a strong desire to have software that allows for more configuration vs. customization to meet the needs of an organization. In this day and edge with tight budgets, companies more than ever need software that provides a real “service” to its users without the extra customization cost added to the already huge investment in the license and maintenance fees. I know that consultants probably don’t want to hear this view for obvious reasons, but if consultants really want to add business value in the future, I believe their service offerings will need to change from offering mostly technical services to offering more strategic and integration services. Times are changing and the change is going to accelerate soon.
The good news is that customers still have choices and I pray that this is always the case. Existing PeopleSoft customers who are looking to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 to get to achieve more integration between their HR and TM processes should seriously consider approaching the decision by doing a software selection project. Going through a software selection project would allow a company to reassess what their true requirements are today and also reassess the viability of the software and vendors that may be in the running.
The key message here is that software changes over time and so does the strategy and ownership of software companies. We also know that new choices emerge over time. Given all of this, now is about the right time for PeopleSoft customers to do some deep thinking about where they want to go; where Oracle is taking PeopleSoft; and whether or not those destinations lead to the same place.
In other words Toots is saying that there’s no issue that a few extra millions in licensing and consulting fees won’t fix. He is also acknowledging clearly that Oracle aims at replacing PeopleSoft with Fusion. Smart customers understand it’s time to start shopping around for a new HCM system, and this time with rock-solid contracts to avoid being taken to the cleaners one more time. Thank God Oracle hasn’t bought ALL major software vendors…yet!
Naomi, you’re so right. This announcement is just a marketing gimmick. Oracle is deinvesting in PeopleSoft but wants to hang on its customers by giving them the impression they are getting some new functionality which is quite paltry in comparison to what Best-of-Breed Talent Management vendors offer. I will give you two recent proofs of Oracle pulling the plug on PeopleSoft as your picture illustrates quite well:
– in France, PeopleSoft’s largest market outside the US, a recent tender, the largest payroll project in memory for all central-government employees, was left to SAP and HR Access to fight about as PeopleSoft declined to participate. Why? Especially when they’ve had a French Public Sector going back to 7.5? Simply because they didn’t want to take on new commitments which they wouldn’t be able to honor, not that that was any issue in the past, but since this is a large GOVERNMENT project they felt they couldn’t do the good old trick of over-promising and under-delivering.
– HP’s announcement that it would build its own workforce planning system, rather than rely on its historical vendor PeopleSoft (see story at http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=374773677)makes the point further. John Renfro, one of HP’s VP for said project, said it in no uncertain terms: ” we were always hoping that that next PeopleSoft version was going to incorporate the changes that we were talking to that firm about. They rarely did.”
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Ahmed Limam
The Global HR Technologist
http://www.AhmedLimam.com
http://ahmedsuniverse.blogspot.com/
Email: contact@ahmedlimam.com
Phone: +33 158 30 88 65
9 rue Pelee
75011 Paris, France
Admed, I really appreciate your taking the time to add some perspective on my post. Naomi