User conference featured promises—and questions—about Oracle's commitment to PeopleSoft users
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
Now that Oracle has acquired PeopleSoft, it can devote more attention to what some industry observers believe could be an even more difficult task: winning the trust of PeopleSoft's customer base.
Several statements at OpenWorld, Oracle's annual user conference held last December in San Francisco, indicate Oracle management realizes PeopleSoft users are skeptical about Oracle's intentions.
"We are going to over-support PeopleSoft users," copresident Charles Phillips said during a press conference. Phillips went on to say that this over-support would involve continued maintenance of—and enhancements to—PeopleSoft's three products: Enterprise, Enterprise One, and World.
Much of the skepticism surrounding Oracle's intentions toward PeopleSoft customers stems from Oracle's long-time reputation as a less than customer friendly vendor. At one point Oracle was openly feuding with the Oracle Application Users Group (OAUG), an independent organization that represents the interests of Oracle customers. But Patricia Dues, OAUG president, says those problems are in the past.
"We now have a strong relationship with Oracle," Dues said at OpenWorld. "We also have great respect for the people developing the software."
Dues, whose full-time job is IT project manager for the city of Las Vegas, also said the latest release of the Oracle E-Business Suite, version 11i.10, is being widely praised by users both for its new functionality and its reliability. That's significant because Oracle's seeming reluctance to fix bugs in previous versions of its product was at the heart of its disputes with OAUG.
David Dobrin, president of B2B Analysts, Cambridge, Mass., says Phillips' words about full support for PeopleSoft customers are nice, but he places more significance on a statement from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's OpenWorld keynote.
Ellison said Oracle intends to complete a new version of Enterprise that PeopleSoft already had begun developing. But within three years, he said, Oracle expects to unveil a "successor product" that will replace both Enterprise and Oracle 11i.
Dobrin argues that this new product will force customers, particularly those now using PeopleSoft applications, to "abandon everything from their user interfaces to their integration strategies. By promising this new superset application suite in an impossibly short period of time," Dobrin adds, "[Ellison is telling customers] he isn't thinking about the problems that concern them."
