Conference Call Excerpt #3
Comments from Aneel Bushri and Dave Duffield --
Aneel Bushri
Quickly turning to PeopleSoft's position in the market, PeopleSoft's focus on customer success, delivering a robust, flexible and easy-to-implement software application solution, and fostering a unique culture has, according to IDC, positioned the company as the number two provider of enterprise solutions. Just to give you some background on our competitive stance versus other players in the marketplace, PeopleSoft today is at 8.5% marketshare of the client/server space. SAP is 24.9, Oracle is 8.4, putting PeopleSoft in the number two position for 1997. In 1996 we were number three, in 1995 we were number seven. So as you've seen, over the last three years we've taken significant market share away from our competitors.
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Bushri
Another interesting trend is to note the market share of the leader in the category, SAP. Over the last three years SAP's share of the client/sever market has gone from 30% in 95, to 26 in 96, to 25 in 97, clearly indicating that this is a very competitive marketplace that is not going to be dominated by one vendor in particular.
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Bushri
We also continue to compete very effectively against our key competitors. I'll highlight some competitive wins against SAP. Those were: American Express, Cushman Wakefield, Federal Express, Kitchener (sp?) Manufacturing, and Society General, just to name a few.
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Dave Duffield
Just a personal perspective here and that is, PeopleSoft 7.5 is huge. And I just want to reiterate how large this product offering is. There are over 2000 person years in development and testing in PeopleSoft 7.5. 100% of that product is geared, or let's say that development effort, is geared to the global customer -- 50% geared to the European customer. PeopleSoft, according to the analysts, has the best solution for the Euro. And as you can see in the press, enthusiasm for the Euro is catching on more and more every day. I will say we're clearly ahead of all the competition other than SAP in global functionality, and we're even closing the gap with them. But we still have beaten SAP, and some significant wins other than the ones Aneel just mentioned are Credit-Suiss group over in Switzerland, a German-speaking part of Switzerland I might add. And I just talked with the CFO about a week ago and when he polled all of the people who made the choice, and by the way this is for our financial application, the choice was unanimous for PeopleSoft. Toyota-Japan has licensed our PeopleSoft financial products and will go live in April of next year. Aneel mentioned Packard Bell-NEC in Europe -- live with our supply chain products. Corning is in great shape. You may know that was a difficult customer, difficult for both of us. Today they're a magnificent customer in production with all our applications and rolling out the whole suite of applications, including manufacturing to two more sites as we speak. Compaq has licensed our PeopleSoft human resource system to displace their in-production SAP human resource system. Walmart will go live in a very few days with a 750,000 person payroll, the largest payroll that I think any company has ever run. Our key customers are doing well, like Ford, Carfor (?) over in France, 3Com, Boise-Cascade, all are in production with one or more of our financial or purchasing/procurement applications. New customers for our manufacturing suite include Borden Foods and Eagle Family Foods. And they we expect to do extremely well with all our products.
But why have we won prior to release of 7.5? And it gets back to our customer focus. I think you all know we are viewed as having the most loyal, satisfied customer base in the business. We are a far better partner than most every other enterprise software provider. And my favorite story, just to point this up, is again about Ford Motor Company that selected our financial applications for implementation in 35 countries around the world. The easy choice would have been SAP, and this was approximately a year and a half ago. But they chose PeopleSoft, not necessarily for features and functions, although in many countries we were right on a par there, but because of two reasons. One, they liked us as people, meaning that we're easy to do business with, and most importantly they trusted us. And they felt that they were selecting a software partner not a software product. And partnerships are there for 20-plus years. So if you're going to pick a vendor to do business with for the next 20 years, the really important things are: do you like to do business with them? are they easy to work with? and are they trustworthy? More and more customers are picking PeopleSoft for our culture, for our commitment to our customers, and the real interest we have in their satisfaction.
Now our win rate over SAP has actually improved, as Aneel has pointed out with the statistics from IDC, and with Release 7.5 we expect that to improve even further. Release 8, which is now on the drawing boards, and other initiatives that Aneel has referred to will further extend our lead over Oracle, Baan, others, and will have totally leveled the functionality, global functionality, playing field with SAP with Release 8. And you couple that with our phenomenal culture and customer commitment, we should take further market share from SAP and others. |
