ERP Associates, Inc.

Today had a decidedly more PeopleSoft theme.  It was quite different from last year when everything was still slideware – the demos today were of functionality that is now available or will be shortly.  Paco Aubre jaun, VP and General Manager of PeopleSoft gave a fast paced walk through of the PeopleSoft 9.1 value proposition and managed to squeeze in an HRMS and Financials demo while he was at it.  And John Webb, VP of PeopleSoft Product Management’s session went a little deeper in the new features and why PeopleSoft 9.1 is a superior product.  I also attended the PS Enterprise Platform update and got some insight into which platforms are supported and why.  It was good to be hearing about new features of a newly released PeopleSoft application again.

PeopleSoft 9.1 looks really good.  It’s obvious a LOT of work went into the products and multiple groups must have made big contributions, including the User Experience team I heard from yesterday.  In fact, user experience was the theme of this release as Oracle took the time to address their customer’s business challenges.  Oracle worked with 150 customers throughout the process – from requirements gathering through testing.  Let’s face it – every release we hear that processes are streamlined, but this time I think they mean it.  For example, to add an item in inventory takes like a zillion pages in 9.0, in 9.1 it’s down to 2 screens and you don’t even have to license Business Analytics to pull it off.

PeopleSoft 9.1 boasts 21 new solutions, 18 of which are delivered under current licenses.  There are 1350 new features.  Oracle built in their customer’s most common customizations, so it should be easier than ever to remove customizations during the next upgrade.

Some of the features I liked:

• RSS feeds – I blogged about how cool RSS feeds in PeopleSoft would be back in 2005 and I’m glad to know I wasn’t crazy.  At that time anyway.
• Career and Succession planning.  Well, actually I was kind of bored in this part of the presentation until I saw the demo of the cool visualization features including side-by-side comparisons of candidates and the ability to drag and drop them into a performance matrix.  I’d imagine this will make managers feel powerful. 
• Getting books closed faster.  The 9.1 team pulled out all the stops to compress the time it takes to close the books, from introducing negative allocation rules to building in online reconciliation features to the subledger.  Oracle expects to reduce time to close by 10%-15% with this release.
• Dynamic Discount Management and Spend Management.  It may not sound cool to us PS Techies, but I can see where making it easy to earn the most interest on your cash on hand would be interesting to people who have to do that job.  And it’s not just driven from the Finance side – suppliers can offer discounts through the supplier portal.
• The workbenches with 360-degree views and putting important information just one click away.
• With any PeopleTools license you can now use the collaborative features of Enterprise Portal at no additional cost.
• PeopleBooks are now available on the Kindle, and Oracle is also hosting them online in a searchable format.
• If you’re running Linux and use Xen as your virtualization tool, you can download a VM Templates for the demo versions of the 9.1 applications.  Furthermore, Oracle is going to keep their VM templates current on maintenance.  Getting a demo environment up and running has never been easier.  It occurs to me that if you’re looking for that one-off that Oracle isn’t going to back-port for you, pulling their latest VM to see how they fixed it could have its advantages.
• They finally fixed performance with Change Assistant File Deployment!
• Verity works on HP UX IA now!
• IE 6 is no longer supported.  Good riddance!
• You can decouple your App Server & Process Scheduler domains from the PS_HOME directory, and share a single PS_HOME directory for all of them, which I'm not sure I see the need for but I'm probably not looking hard enough.

Is 9.1 as good as what PeopleSoft would have released in the pre-acquisition world, and was the release as timely?  I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s relevant. According to the presenters, PeopleSoft has a very high customer retention rate, over 50% of Oracle’s clients are on post acquisition releases, and over 250 new customers were added last year.  If the customers are happy with the value they’re getting that’s really all that matters.