Recently "inaugurated" as the No. 2 leading business applications provider after digesting former J.D. Edwards & Company, PeopleSoft, Inc. (NASDAQ: PSFT), has been making decisive moves to deliver a number of new, and refurbished solutions, in a great part by leveraging the recently acquired product portfolio. Although the vendor has acted swiftly on assimilating the former competitor (see PeopleSoft Gathers Manufacturing and SCM Wherewithal), these recent initiatives might show us that the vendor has moved even farther from the digestion stage into a full-blown execution and productivity phase.
Recent announcements that reflect this are
* PeopleSoft World Express, one of the industry's most comprehensive solutions for smaller businesses with annual revenues between $20 million and $100 million (USD), on May 3, at COMMON 2004, the IBM iSeries user conference.
* A new release of PeopleSoft World that included more than 280 new features and enhancements that span the product family's human capital management (HCM), supply chain management (SCM), and financial management (FM) applications, and a new web-based user interface (UI),on March 18 at CeBIT 2004.
* Further extensions of the longstanding partnership with IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced during PeopleSoft 2004 Leadership Summit which expands their global alliance by enabling IBM's expanding SMB reseller channel (see IBM Express-es Its Candid Desire for SMEs) to offer PeopleSoft applications. PeopleSoft on May 18.
For details, see Part One.
The vendor's solutions within enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise portals, business intelligence (BI), and supplier relationship management (SRM) functionality provide a wide scope of features, and very few smaller vendors can provide tightly integrated applications of this magnitude under one umbrella. Furthermore, PeopleSoft has one of the strongest product technology in terms of scalability, and support for almost all industry relevant platforms and middleware standards, with Web service standards like XML, simple object access protocol (SOAP) and universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) being already embedded within their latest product releases, such as has been the case with the PeopleSoft's AppConnect platform.
Yet, even for the upper mid-market, the pre-configured tier one PeopleSoft Enterprise solutions remain complex applications, and the Internet architecture and new intuitive interfaces can mitigate that only so much. This perception of complexity remains ammunition that the incumbent tier two vendors will continue to exploit in order to hinder bigger brethren's attempt to penetrate their traditional stronghold. Furthermore, not all powerful functionality (e.g., SRM or product lifecycle management [PLM]) would be readily available for many of those pre-configured solutions, which may be a serious drawback when competing against the solid tier two vendors which have long-offered their entire suites without any disparity between solutions for bigger and smaller customers (e.g., Intentia, IFS, QAD , SSA Global, MAPICS or Glovia). The "Accelerated Solutions" or "All-in-One Solutions", while enabling large vendors and their channel to offer a fixed price and fixed time implementation program in a modular way, may sometimes not necessarily offer total extended-ERP functional scope. By the time the customer puts together modules to build a full collaborative enterprise system for a mid-market company, and then adds up the multiple implementation time and cost, all the touted benefits might have been annulled in some instances when incumbent mid-market vendors cover all the bases with their well-entrenched offering.
Thus, it is not difficult to justify the former PeopleSoft's "accelerated" mid-market initiatives to be gradually supplanted by selling the genuine PeopleSoft EntepriseOne product within its native, upper mid-market segment, where it has long successfully given run for the above-mentioned tier two solutions' money. Moreover, tackling the lower market segment has proven to be a much tougher nut to crack for several reasons. The main reason would be that this is the home ground of the likes of Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) (see Microsoft Keeps on Rounding up Its Business Solutions), the Sage Group, whose US subsidiary is called Best Software, and which has recently acquired Softline and ACCPAC (see Will Sage Group Cement Its SME Leadership with ACCPAC and Softline Acquisitions?). The list does not stop here, given the likes of Exact Software (see Exact Software—Working Diligently Towards the "One Exact" Synergy), or Epicor Software, which has lately had its share of recovery and subsequent acquisitions (see Epicor Conducts Its Own ROI Acquisition Rationale) and which is soon to be merged with another SMB stalwart, Scala. Finally, there are a number of other highly specialized and newcomer smaller companies like SYSPRO, Intuit or NetSuite catering to specific industries for accounting and manufacturing systems, while also building simple homegrown systems to handle functions like CRM or sales force automation (SFA).
The above vendors understand this market and have thus gained the market and mind share, and loyal customers. In addition to product offering, they have long heavily invested in recruiting, motivating, and supporting the value-added resellers (VARs) that service the segment. Thus, trying to sell simplified versions of mySAP Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise/PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne or Oracle E-Business Suite, without a serious re-engineering of these products, has not worked so far in the lower-end of the market.
Recent announcements that reflect this are
* PeopleSoft World Express, one of the industry's most comprehensive solutions for smaller businesses with annual revenues between $20 million and $100 million (USD), on May 3, at COMMON 2004, the IBM iSeries user conference.
* A new release of PeopleSoft World that included more than 280 new features and enhancements that span the product family's human capital management (HCM), supply chain management (SCM), and financial management (FM) applications, and a new web-based user interface (UI),on March 18 at CeBIT 2004.
* Further extensions of the longstanding partnership with IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced during PeopleSoft 2004 Leadership Summit which expands their global alliance by enabling IBM's expanding SMB reseller channel (see IBM Express-es Its Candid Desire for SMEs) to offer PeopleSoft applications. PeopleSoft on May 18.
For details, see Part One.
The vendor's solutions within enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise portals, business intelligence (BI), and supplier relationship management (SRM) functionality provide a wide scope of features, and very few smaller vendors can provide tightly integrated applications of this magnitude under one umbrella. Furthermore, PeopleSoft has one of the strongest product technology in terms of scalability, and support for almost all industry relevant platforms and middleware standards, with Web service standards like XML, simple object access protocol (SOAP) and universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) being already embedded within their latest product releases, such as has been the case with the PeopleSoft's AppConnect platform.
Yet, even for the upper mid-market, the pre-configured tier one PeopleSoft Enterprise solutions remain complex applications, and the Internet architecture and new intuitive interfaces can mitigate that only so much. This perception of complexity remains ammunition that the incumbent tier two vendors will continue to exploit in order to hinder bigger brethren's attempt to penetrate their traditional stronghold. Furthermore, not all powerful functionality (e.g., SRM or product lifecycle management [PLM]) would be readily available for many of those pre-configured solutions, which may be a serious drawback when competing against the solid tier two vendors which have long-offered their entire suites without any disparity between solutions for bigger and smaller customers (e.g., Intentia, IFS, QAD , SSA Global, MAPICS or Glovia). The "Accelerated Solutions" or "All-in-One Solutions", while enabling large vendors and their channel to offer a fixed price and fixed time implementation program in a modular way, may sometimes not necessarily offer total extended-ERP functional scope. By the time the customer puts together modules to build a full collaborative enterprise system for a mid-market company, and then adds up the multiple implementation time and cost, all the touted benefits might have been annulled in some instances when incumbent mid-market vendors cover all the bases with their well-entrenched offering.
Thus, it is not difficult to justify the former PeopleSoft's "accelerated" mid-market initiatives to be gradually supplanted by selling the genuine PeopleSoft EntepriseOne product within its native, upper mid-market segment, where it has long successfully given run for the above-mentioned tier two solutions' money. Moreover, tackling the lower market segment has proven to be a much tougher nut to crack for several reasons. The main reason would be that this is the home ground of the likes of Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) (see Microsoft Keeps on Rounding up Its Business Solutions), the Sage Group, whose US subsidiary is called Best Software, and which has recently acquired Softline and ACCPAC (see Will Sage Group Cement Its SME Leadership with ACCPAC and Softline Acquisitions?). The list does not stop here, given the likes of Exact Software (see Exact Software—Working Diligently Towards the "One Exact" Synergy), or Epicor Software, which has lately had its share of recovery and subsequent acquisitions (see Epicor Conducts Its Own ROI Acquisition Rationale) and which is soon to be merged with another SMB stalwart, Scala. Finally, there are a number of other highly specialized and newcomer smaller companies like SYSPRO, Intuit or NetSuite catering to specific industries for accounting and manufacturing systems, while also building simple homegrown systems to handle functions like CRM or sales force automation (SFA).
The above vendors understand this market and have thus gained the market and mind share, and loyal customers. In addition to product offering, they have long heavily invested in recruiting, motivating, and supporting the value-added resellers (VARs) that service the segment. Thus, trying to sell simplified versions of mySAP Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise/PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne or Oracle E-Business Suite, without a serious re-engineering of these products, has not worked so far in the lower-end of the market.
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