Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

The Post-PeopleSoft Landscape and the Future of ERP

Page:

Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft is not the dawn of a scary new era for CIOs; it's the twilight of the old ERP age. It may also be an opportunity to create an ERP future that adds value, not cost, to your business

Reader ROI

  • How the relative stability of your current ERP platform determines your next steps

  • How to choose between the status quo, third-party support and system upgrades

  • What role service-oriented architecture plays in the ERP future

Last February, Rick Beers, Corning's director of business process architecture, brought together CIOs from Bausch and Lomb, Harris Corporation, Leggett and Platt, and five other Fortune 500 companies for an extraordinary summit in Atlanta. All shared the distinction of being among the world's largest users of PeopleSoft enterprise software. Beers called the meeting because he wanted to discuss the single most pressing issue facing them: Creating business value from enterprise applications.

In other words, after a year and a half of histrionics and angst, after Oracle paid $US10.3 billion to adopt 13,000 PeopleSoft customers (many of which had chosen PeopleSoft precisely because it was not Oracle), the single most pressing issue these giant companies were facing was not the hostile takeover.

How odd.

Or maybe not.

Beers' summit was planned months before the acquisition went through and, he says, it would have happened even if the merger hadn't, and with roughly the same agenda. The Atlanta Eight had already figured out that despite all the speculation in the media and among CIOs themselves, the Oracle-PeopleSoft deal, as Beers says, "hasn't changed much".

What Beers and the CIOs meeting in Atlanta understood was that the current model for enterprise applications - the way they're built, the way they're paid for, the value they create - is breaking down and had been long before Oracle dug deep to buy its competitor.

"What I'm trying to accomplish here," says Beers, "is to get others to pay attention to what's going on. If we can't architect ERP around our business model, we end up with a bunch of systems that don't interoperate. Value has to come from [integration], not from new point features. Otherwise, we can't achieve the value we expect from ERP."

That, not who won or lost in which boardroom, is what's important. In this article, we will present a plan for CIOs who use PeopleSoft (and JD Edwards). The plan will address tactical steps for the near-term, and also strategic plans for the profound, long-term change that Beers and many others are convinced is coming.

But first, let's reflect on why this is such an excellent time to be a PeopleSoft user.

Page:

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Accenture, Bausch and Lomb, Billion, Bridgestone, Corning, Exodus, HIS Limited, IBM, IDC, JD Edwards, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Promise, SAP

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Oracle Exadata - Extreme performance, lowest cost.
    As organizations contend with escalating demands for greater quantities of information, more sophisticated data analysis, and a burgeoning user population, Oracle Exadata makes database workloads faster, easier to manage, and less expensive. Oracle Exadata is the world’s first database machine to provide extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. Read this whitepaper.
    Learn more »
  • 8 reasons why Citrix NetScaler beats the competition
    Application delivery controllers (ADC) are one of the most critical elements of cloud infrastructures and enterprise data centre architectures. ADCs strongly impact performance, scale and security of the entire application environment, so it is extremely important for IT leaders to choose the right one.
    Learn more »
  • 10 Ways to Stretch your storage budgets in virtualised, consolidated environments
    Everyone’s heard the line about the only inevitabilities in life being death and taxes. IT managers, however, would quickly assert a third absolute – higher storage needs. There’s no question data storage requirements continue to skyrocket, and there’s absolutely zero likelihood of that ending any time in our lifetime. Enterprises have successfully controlled their IT budgets and server sprawl issues with the help of virtualisation technologies, but what’s next? Increasingly, organizations are turning to storage consolidation for virtualised server environments in order to reduce data center costs and inefficiencies.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments