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Databases Programming Software Microsoft Businesses IT

Microsoft Eyes PeopleSoft Customers 266

Posted by CowboyNeal from the making-their-move dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to a couple articles, Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future. What does it mean for the landscape of the ERP market if Microsoft starts being more competitive with its Axapta product?"
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Microsoft Eyes PeopleSoft Customers More

Microsoft Eyes PeopleSoft Customers

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  • It's because... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gardyloo ( 512791 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @07:54PM (#11316449)
    ...those people are so soft and squishy.

  • PeopleSoft customers... (Score:5, Funny)

    by sjrstory ( 839289 ) * on Monday January 10, 2005 @07:55PM (#11316454) Homepage
    ...Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own!

  • Umm, yeah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by hendridm ( 302246 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @07:56PM (#11316460) Homepage
    In other news, SuSe eyes Redhat customers, Carl Jrs eyes McDonalds' customers, and Bubs' Concessions Stand eyes Kmart customers.
    • In other news, SuSe eyes Redhat customers, Carl Jrs eyes McDonalds' customers, and Bubs' Concessions Stand eyes Kmart customers.

      Few other companies care to use FUD marketing of the sort Microsoft is the master of. Novel may indeed want Red Hat customers, but they are not going to make an announcement of Red Hat's impending doom that will be echoed by an unbelievable chorus of PC pulp pushers and pundits with Dido qualifications. The uncertainty here is about as manufactured as IBM's supposed abandonment

  • hidden clause? (Score:5, Funny)

    by frogger01 ( 806562 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @07:58PM (#11316474) Journal
    people soft's hidden ELUA line:

    "at any point we could be bought out by microsoft and your customer service could cease to exsist."

    that'll learn all you blind-accept-button-pushers

    • WTF is the End-License User Agreement? Another crazy tactic by Gates I'd imagine..

      Actually, when I saw the headline for this article I thought of the scene where Mr. Anderson receives the phone from the FedEx guy and Morpheus gives him a call. Obviously, on the other end is Gates or perhaps Ballmer using the Microsoft Windows Speech Enhancer to disguise his voice.

      "Customer Service...do you want to know what it is?"

  • Microsoft? ERP? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Michael Hunt ( 585391 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @07:59PM (#11316480) Homepage
    What ERP software does Microsoft have which is even capable of playing in this space? The products they acquired after the Great Plains acquisition certainly aren't (speaking as somebody who had to administer said package for several years in the early 21st century.)

    One presumes MS know what they're doing, but this is certainly a weird gambit.

    • Re:Microsoft? ERP? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cbelt3 ( 741637 )
      Yeah sure. Like they did so well with Microsoft Money. Let's face it- they don't know beans about financial software, much less ERP. And they don't have the galactic network of partners and pimps like the other bigs do. So they'll jump in, lose their assets, and jump out. Like they always do. Windows, Office. That's pretty much it.
      • I would find that amusing. Especially if it lead, directly or indirectly, to the falling-by-the-wayside-with-vultures-circling-the- carcass of Great Plains packages such as Solomon. Three years on and I'm still scarred.

        VB3! IT WAS WRITTEN IN VB3 FFS!!!!
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • PeopleSoft ERP stuff (and I suspect this is true of SAP and Oracle, too) is exceedingly complicated. The only way to truely comprehend the complexity of it all is to work with it on the technical side. After a year of working with it, you will look back on that year and realize that all the knowledge you've obtained comprises only a small fraction of the everything there is to know about the system. Part of the complexity is simply due to the wide variety of business practices that exist throughout the w

      • Re:Microsoft? ERP? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Plugh ( 27537 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @09:40PM (#11317118) Homepage
        Fleeing the oppressive Oracle to attain the safety of Microsoft seems to me like fleeing oppressive California for the safety of Stalinist Russia.
      • When did not knowing anything about a problem domain ever stop any company from shipping software? I just pity the early adopter's though...
    • I used to work at SAP. To put this in perspective, Microsoft currently has about 2% market share in the entire ERP market and 0 customers in the fortune 500. The only place they have any traction is the small business segment which is an area that the big players have typically overlooked because the customers just can't afford the costs associated with EXTREAMLY complex, HIGHLY customized software.

      You'd think that since small business are small, their requirements for ERP software wouldn't be that difficu
      • No freaking kidding. I work for a mid size (18 employee) consulting firm. We are looking for something to replace MS CRM for ticket tracking and Time Slips for time management. We'd love to have an enter it once get the info out as many ways as possible system, it just doesn't exist. We want to be able to create a ticket, enter notes and expenses, and be able to generate bills, customer satisfaction surveys, and knowledge base entries. There isn't anything even remotly like that out there, and the time and

        • It seems to me that as a consulting firm, you must be able to generate more money than e.g. a transport company.

          I worked in a transport company with 20 people, and I did the IT, which was based upon a minicomputer with a relational database and a rapid application development, with programming in COBOL.

          It seems they started out with a custom built solution, done by an external company, and delivered completely with sources, so that the local IT responsible could update and add applications.

          It seems that

          • The biggest problem is not programming, it is domain knowledge transfer from you to the person doing the programming and the maintenance.

            You hit the nail right on the head. This is why there is such a huge trend to use standard software. Custom code just leads to headaches, even when done in house and is why so many people have headaches when they upgrade their ERP systems.

  • competition is good, usually (Score:3, Interesting)

    by crimethinker ( 721591 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:01PM (#11316495)
    In general, if Microsoft is more competitive with its products, that will force PeopleSoft to improve theirs, or stop gouging for support contracts, or whatever.

    However, based on MS's past behaviours, I think we can look forward to a "good enough" replacement for PeopleSoft to be built into the next version of Windows. MS will forbid OEM's to remove it because they don't want a "confusing user experience." Oh, and it will increase the "Microsoft tax" on your new PC that you were only going to load Linux on.

    Don't get me wrong - I like competition, but I like fair competition, based on merits. It reminds me of my high-school football team; the football was some sort of "regulation size and colour," and so the high school chose its school colours such that one of them matched the ball colour perfectly. When we played home games, we got to pick whether we would wear the light or the dark-coloured jerseys, and of course, we chose the ones that matched the ball. It made it very difficult for the other players to tell who had the ball, and made diversionary fakes a lot easier. When we played away, our opponents would choose the dark colour, so that our team wore the light (and very contrasting) colour jerseys. Net result? We won a lot more home games, and by higher margins. Hardly what I'd call "fair."

    Mod this -1, Long-winded.

    -paul

    • Re:competition is good, usually (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bablooo ( 112587 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @09:06PM (#11316928)
      However, based on MS's past behaviours, I think we can look forward to a "good enough" replacement for PeopleSoft to be built into the next version of Windows. MS will forbid OEM's to remove it because they don't want a "confusing user experience." Oh, and it will increase the "Microsoft tax" on your new PC that you were only going to load Linux on.

      You have no idea what business PeopleSoft is in do you?

      PeopleSoft makes Enterprise Resource Planning [peoplesoft.com] software. Microsoft has very little to compete in this segment of business. The big king here is SAP [sap.com], the German ERP software maker that has 29% of the market. Oracle has bought PeopleSoft [oracle.com] after 18 months of intense and hostile negotiation. Microsoft is eyeing PeopleSoft customers for it's Microsoft Business Solutions [microsoft.com] productline - which is hardly competition in near future.

    • Re:competition is good, usually (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AstroDrabb ( 534369 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @09:26PM (#11317043)
      However, based on MS's past behaviours, I think we can look forward to a "good enough" replacement for PeopleSoft to be built into the next version of Windows.
      Huh? There is no way that MS would include a CRM solution in the next version of MS Windows. Good CRM solutions take a long time to build with a lot of customer feedback. MS' CRM solution cost them a lot of cash, MS is not just going to throw that into their next server release.

      The MS CRM offering doesn't come close to PeopleSoft or SAP. I am a senior programmer for a fortune 500 with 140,000 employees. We recently finished a _very_ long deployment of PeopleSoft HR and PeopleSoft Portal. We looked at what MS had to offer and it didn't even come close. We looked at SAP and we looked at Oracle. All of our mission critical data is in Oracle and the not-to-important-data is in SQL Server or a few MySQL databases. We were actually leaning toward Oracle's product (because we use it as our critical DB), however they didn't have a few _very_ important functionalities that we need for our HR processes, so that left PeopleSoft and SAP.

      Converting your whole HR/payroll process (especially when you pay 140,000+ employees every week) to any other system takes a ton of time and a ton of cash. We spent tens of millions on these two systems. There is no way in the world we would redo everything in an MS product.

      Our systems are running great. We are about 2 versions behind on the latest PeopleSoft releases. We will probably just upgrade to the last PeopleSoft release and leave it alone. Every upgrade costs tons of money and time.

      There is also the fact that were I work, all of our financial data and warehouse is _only_ in Oracle. Will the MS product allow you to work with a non-SQL Server DB (I doubt it)? There is no chance in H-E-L-L that we would take our critical data out of Oracle and put it in MS SQL Server. Then there is the issue of what technology MS built their system on. It has been out for a while, so I will assume it is in old ASP? No thank, we don't want that crap on our network. Java or ASP.Net/C# only please.

    • Re:competition is good, usually (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ckaminski ( 82854 ) <slashdot-nospam.darthcoder@com> on Monday January 10, 2005 @10:14PM (#11317301) Homepage
      Once you get past the OS and the Internet Information Server, MS has ZERO hold on the horizontal server enterprise application market, so any competition they can bring is by definition "fair". As fair as anything Oracle and SAP will let them get away with. If it brings costs down for the end-user, that's only good for the end-user.

  • Choose open source ERP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iPaqMan ( 230487 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:01PM (#11316497)
    Corporations loath vendor lock-in as much as you or I. Why haven't open source ERP packages, like compiere (http://www.compiere.org/), taken off???

    • Re:Choose open source ERP (Score:4, Informative)

      by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:07PM (#11316547) Homepage
      Why haven't open source ERP packages, like compiere (http://www.compiere.org/), taken off???

      One reason is that until very recently you needed Oracle DB to run Compiere. There is a slew of new FOOS DB's in the works for Compiere most interesting it Fyracle [janus-software.com]the Oracle Mode Firebird

    • Re:Choose open source ERP (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Michael Hunt ( 585391 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:16PM (#11316607) Homepage
      Whilst corporations loathe vendor lockin, they love accoutability, especially for huge, towering vertical monoliths of software packages such as ERPs.

      If my ERP breaks, I don't have time to read mailing lists and ask in IRC channels for somebody to help me write a patch. I want a butt connected with my boot, preferably somebody senior representing the vendor, and then I want a fix available in a time which meets my SLA.

      Anything less is unacceptable.

      • Re:Choose open source ERP (Score:5, Insightful)

        by killjoe ( 766577 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @09:18PM (#11316990)
        To be more precise people love the illusion of accountability. If your ERP breaks peoplesoft will not do anything for you. You will though get to blame them to the board and they won't hear you cos they are sleeping or scheming to rip off the shareholders.
        • To be more precise people love the illusion of accountability. If your ERP breaks peoplesoft will not do anything for you.

          Duh. That's why you hire consultatnts. So you have someone to blame. And sue.

      • Re:Choose open source ERP (Score:5, Insightful)

        by grozzie2 ( 698656 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @10:38PM (#11317426)
        The reality is, you want somebody to blame, so you can pass the buck. If you were truely interested in a cost effective solution, you would take 1/3 of the monthly support payments you send to peoplesoft, and use it to support folks on the open source projects. No more reading mailing lists, and no more begging for help in irc channels, you have knowledgable, expert support, merely a phone call or email away. When there is a problem, you'll probably get a fix slipstreamed within 24 hours, vs what you get from ps, a series of meetings, evaluation, and then a decision if they will bother to fix or not, and if they do, a schedule for deployment sometime in the next quarter.

        Never ceases to amaze me how many folks want commercial grade support, for open source products, but, want it for free. Folks serious about using open source, pay monthly retainers to open source developers. For that, they get industrial grade software, with lots of input to the development direction, and in general, support is only a phone call or email away.

          • When there is a problem, you'll probably get a fix slipstreamed within 24 hours, vs what you get from ps, a series of meetings, evaluation, and then a decision if they will bother to fix or not, and if they do, a schedule for deployment sometime in the next quarter.

          It really depends on the case and whether or not the critical incident is a software bug or something else. When I've opened P1 cases with PeopleSoft I've had excellent and extremely responsive service from their analysts.

          In the few cases

      • Anything less is unacceptable.

        As another poster says, it's all about passing the buck.

        I've been on the client and vending end of hundreds of support contracts.

        Hardware support contracts can be expensive but are worthwhile if uptime is critical, mainly because you tend to get fast access to spare parts.

        Software support contracts however are a complete waste of time and money. About all they're good for is couriering replacement media. If the software has a heisenbug it will never be fixed ("we can'

  • "Microsoft Eyes Peoplesoft Customers" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:02PM (#11316509)

    That's like saying 'serial killer eyes next victim.'

  • Common sense? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moz25 ( 262020 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:03PM (#11316520) Homepage
    I don't see what's special about this... it makes normal business sense to pick up customers that may be becoming available... it's not even typically unethical in my opinion.

  • Not bloody likely many will switch (Score:3, Insightful)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:06PM (#11316536) Homepage Journal
    Shepherd further noted that companies that have spent millions of dollars on their PeopleSoft business systems are unlikely to tear out those systems and start over just because Microsoft is offering a discount.

    The Microsoft offer "is barely worth the paper the press release was written on," Shepherd said. I think the end of the article sums it up succinctly.

    • Shepherd further noted that companies that have spent millions of dollars on their PeopleSoft business systems are unlikely to tear out those systems and start over just because Microsoft is offering a discount

      The partners and consultants that would facilitate just such a transition won't even be looking at prospective users/customers unless they are growing and likely to continue to. That means change in the enterprise anyway, and that means the budget to do something about it. Remember, most companies
  • Hmmm... with Microsoft web products, I often get 500 errors.

    My employeer launched their new Peoplesoft HR website last month, and I 500 errors every couple of clicks...

    So, since MS is really good at serving 500 errors, I'm sure they will be an excellent replacement for Peoplesoft's products.

  • 'scuse you. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Soko ( 17987 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:16PM (#11316612) Homepage
    "ERP".

    Bill, excuse yourself after you eat, please. Gosh. That's not right.

    Soko
  • ...until Microsoft chooses a more pronounceable name than "Axapta".

  • No surprise. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is the same reason I'm most worried about EA/vivendi's little slurping sprees trying to eat up the gaming industry. Unnatural consolidation in any market helps no one but the largest consolidated players.

    In particular, consolidation in an industry helps Microsoft. Only a healthy market can resist takeover by Microsoft, and vice versa.
  • I've been watching the Compiere project for a while: http://www.compiere.org/

    I think this project can gain a lot of ground from this Peoplesoft fiasco if it improves its marketing... and doesnt require users to use Oracle as a backend ($1500 is a lot of money for little people). I think there is currently work going on for porting this to postgres though.

    • $1500 is a lot of money for little people

      People for whom $1500 is a lot of money don't need Peoplesoft. Seriously. Sure, a modern ERP is expensive. Same holds true for specialized manufacturing software, WMS applications, et cetera. But you know what? Its mission critical - more important to a large company than any other software product, and a damn site more critical a choice than an OS platform.

      Can you imagine the financial fallout if, say, everyone working for Coca Cola didn't get paid one week?
      • Once you go over 20 employees in a company the processes and procedures to be followed are as complex as a company woth 5000 employees, what changes is the liability the company incours if they screw up.
        • Once you go over 20 employees in a company the processes and procedures to be followed are as complex as a company woth 5000 employees, what changes is the liability the company incours if they screw up.

          Not really. In a company of 20 people (and I know something about this, being a principal of a small company [blueskylogistics.com] myself), everybody knows everybody else. You can do payroll by filling out a web form on ADP.com in 15 minutes. Employee files all fit inside a single file cabinet drawer, and you probably only h
    • ($1500 is a lot of money for little people). I think there is currently work going on for porting this to postgres though.

      $1500 is a lot for individuals, it's also would cover one consultant-day to cover the implementation - if the consultant came in late, left early and took a long lunch...

      Seriously, I've worked everywhere from a 20 man shop up through some of the big software and hardware manufacturer's and $1,500 is noise, an almost trivial amount...

  • This is classic Microsoft strategy. Use the monopoly revenues from Windows and Office to dump other products at a loss until they get enough market share that the new products are self-supporting. They probably figure that it's worth a try.

  • I for one... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:26PM (#11316697)
    ...applaud our new ERP overlords. The current players in the field are a blight on the entire IT industry. Has anyone EVER seen a large ERP deployment come in anywhere close to budget, schedule or requirements? This whole sector represents the absolute worst of IT consulting: unfulfilled promises, bloated billings, incompetent staff and crap products. As far as I can tell, the big players keep getting these contracts simply because they are the biggest and not because they have ever produced anything worthwhile.

    At best, I consider MS to provide a good prototyping environment and an acceptable, if buggy, desktop. That said, even their products would be a great improvement over the state of that particular sector and it seems that only IBM and MS are big enough to convince the PHBs that they are viable alternatives.
    • I would submit that at least in my experience, a major cause of the (budget and time-related) failure of ERP projects is the inability of the users to adequately define their business processes, and stick to the original scope of a project. Typically you get several months in to a large-scale project and suddenly they want to add in functionality rather than waiting to do that as a post-implementation improvement.

      The IT side also tends to fail by using modification as a first resort to meeting user needs.

  • PeopleSoft (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mark_MF-WN ( 678030 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @08:29PM (#11316715)
    Anything is better than PeopleSoft. My school rolled out a system developed by PeopleSoft to handle course registration and enrollment, and it's undoubtedly the WORST piece of shit I've every used -- and I've used Microsoft Works!

    I hope PeopleSoft is wiped from the earth. I'd take Microsoft's unpleasant, buggy software over PeopleSoft's completely unusable atrocities any day.

    • and it's undoubtedly the WORST piece of shit I've every used -- and I've used Microsoft Works!

      Actually I thought MS Works was quite fine. But then again, that was Works 5 on DOS 5.0 back in '94.
  • "starts being more competitive with its Axapta product"

    Ah, never heard of it...

    Guess that answers that question...

  • Kuali Project (Score:4, Interesting)

    by flacco ( 324089 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @09:30PM (#11317065)
    two universities are working on an "open-ish" source alternative to PeopleSoft:

    http://www.kualiproject.org/

    if a university's going to move off of peoplesoft, and they can stick it out, this might be a safer move than signing in blood with MS.

  • It means more people vulnerable to furure viruses and the like due to a closed-source Microsoft product. Frankly, I wouldn't touch that with a 20-foot pole.

  • We use Axapta where I work. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 10, 2005 @11:13PM (#11317687)
    And I have to honestly say it is one of the smelliest turds of a piece of software that I have ever had the displeasure to be saddled with.

    Here's a quick example: you open a list of 1000 items that are displayed in a grid. You want to see the 500th item. You'd think that you just grab the scroll bar and scroll down to the middle, right? WRONG!!! That will take you to about record 20. If you want to go the the 500th item, you'll have to hit PgDn about 100 times. And each time you hit PgDn, you'll have to wait about half a second for the grid to redraw. If you have your doctorate in mathematics you might be able to figure that you're looking at about a minute to just to scroll down a short list of items. Seriously. And it's all like that. I don't know how people write software that badly.

    I've never used Peoplesoft, but I cannot imagine that it is even conceivable that it could be any worse than Axapta.
    • I program for an international ERP software company, and one thing I notice in addressing such challenges is that the desire to centralize the data and yet provide remote access is the counterbalance to high performance. In MS Access, a long scrolling list of items would not be such a problem when you're working with a local database. But since the data needs to be centralized, and access to the system needs to be remote, ERP systems have to be designed in a way that can allow remote users to deal with a

  • Uh-huh... (Score:3, Funny)

    by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @12:56AM (#11318321)
    Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future

    Because the future is always certian when it comes to Microsoft software products!

  • If they were that foolish to buy PSFT (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stone316 ( 629009 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @01:20AM (#11318420) Journal
    in the first place then they'd be foolish enough to switch to an MS product..

    Wait now, we use use PSFT in house! Doh!

    In all seriousness, i'm not that impressed with peoplesoft... We use the HR, Helpdesk and eRecruit packages... I've been the prime DBA for the latter two. You can say what you want about Oracle products being complex, unwieldy but it provides tremendous flexibility. If you know what your doing there's a ton of stats and debugging info available to you. Psft on the other hand is an absolutely nightmare to tune.

  • Let Microsoft play for tablescraps (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @03:31AM (#11318892) Homepage Journal
    The biggest player in the market is not Oracle, its pawn Peoplesoft or Microsoft.

    The biggest player is SAP, and they will be extracting their due.

  • Sort of like a wolf eyes sheep, it'd scare the heck outta me!
  • Microsoft is expected to support the DOJ's position that Microsoft doesn't compete in the high-end ERP market that is dominated by the three largest rivals, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP AG.

    Microsoft held firm in its testimony that it has no plans to move its current enterprise application software products into Oracle's large enterprise space, despite Oracle's defense attorney holding up a number of Microsoft documents which outline the high-functioning product migrating into that market.

    Oracle Peop [itutilitypipeline.com]

  • Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future.

    This is like a big whale (Oracle) is about to get bitten by a pirana (Microsoft) and the customers will have to pay, and pay and pay.

    Now if the companies invested in open source or their own source code built on an open POSIX based system then these vendors would not be able to do this. If you had the source you don't have to worry about a ve

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