PeopleSoft Provides Road Map for Integration
Thu Sep 18, 2:36 PM ET
Erika Morphy, www.CRMDaily.com
At PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT - news) Connect 2003 this week, the ERP vendor gave the crowd its much-anticipated plans for integrating and updating the PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards (Nasdaq: JDEC - news) product lines. Key among its announcements was the extended support the company promised to provide to PeopleSoft v.8 and J.D. Edwards 5.
Besides the usual tech support, companies will receive an extra year of upgrade scripts and an extra two years of regulatory and tax changes. "It's a very aggressive strategy," PeopleSoft vice president of CRM marketing Brad Wilson told CRMDaily.com. "We are providing the longest support cycle for all these products."
There are three main categories of products to be offered under the newly merged company:
PeopleSoft Enterprise (news - web sites), which is PeopleSoft's flagship platform aimed at large enterprises;
PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne, which is J.D. Edwards' OneWorld platform aimed at mid-market companies; and
PeopleSoft World, which is J.D. Edwards' re-branded World product for IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) iSeries (AS/400) customers.
Kapalua Release
The CRM modules in these releases will all be enhanced as well, Wilson said. The next release -- 8.9, set to roll out in Q2 2004 -- has been renamed "Kapalua" (yes, after the resort beach in Hawaii) and already has in the works enhancements around strategic account management, customer portfolio management, enhanced PRM and other modules. "The first level of this particular product road map is to continue the course on our existing client and build that functionality on top of PeopleSoft CRM 8.8."
Also, PeopleSoft will be incorporating some elements from the J.D. Edwards suite, particularly the vertical applications that PeopleSoft does not yet have, such as private banking services. "We will also be adding new functional modules and asset management and, in general, leveraging expertise from the J.D. Edwards side of the family," Wilson said.
As for the J.D. Edwards customers, Wilson said that a certain percentage of those companies are interested in the higher-end PeopleSoft CRM application. "For them, we are building integration links."
EnterpriseOne
For the most part, PeopleSoft has decided that the strategy J.D. Edwards had in place to integrate the PeopleSoft CRM modules with its toolset is sufficient. "It is very aggressive, and we will be accelerating it to a certain extent," Wilson said. Once the build-out of the toolset is complete, J.D. Edwards customers will have full Unicode compliance, enhanced order management and other new functions available to them.
PeopleSoft also will transfer some of its intellectual property to that release, providing such features as claims handling in the contact center, order processing in the sales module, and pricing and promotion management in the marketing application. |
