Recently "inaugurated" as the No. 2 leading business applications provider after digesting the 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 its recently acquired product portfolio. Although the vendor has acted swiftly on assimilating its 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 and 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.
Although the World Express product is aimed at new, prospective customers (estimated 50,000 in North America), there may be an indirect importance of assuring the existing, still disheartened PeopleSoft World install base and channel of the product's brighter future. The product has undergone significant enhancements almost immediately after the merger, such as the integration with PeopleSoft EPM and the above-mentioned annual cumulative update for the release 7.3. Further, given that the integration with PeopleSoft SRM is slated for the end of 2004, and the next annual cumulative update should take place early in 2005, these events should be the best testimonials of the new owner's renewed commitment to the long neglected product line.
However, getting the market and the channel's mindset back into the more active selling of the product will not be that easy given a protracted limbo (PeopleSoft claims a few dozen new sales during 2003, without any significant orchestrated marketing and sales effort). No wonder then that the most likely torch bearing proponent at this stage will be IBM and its channel of iSeries resellers and distributors. Even pre-merger PeopleSoft and IBM have had some history since early in 2001. They announced a partnership to speed up the delivery of business applications for small and medium businesses (SMB), as PeopleSoft had early targeted IBM Business Partners to offer mid-market prospects a rapid deployment program for former PeopleSoft 8 (now PeopleSoft Enterprise) accelerated applications. The companies then announced Architecture Jumpstart, an ISO 9000 certified, rapid eBusiness deployment program designed for the fast implementation needs of mid-market customers. The pre-packaged turnkey solution included a workstation and an application and database server, all pre-bundled and offered with fixed pricing to deliver a completely installed and configured environment which includes demo, testing, training, and production databases.
Yet, it may still take some serious effort to produce a real magic bullet to attract the vast majority of smaller enterprises even with these latest initiatives. PeopleSoft needs to more efficiently mine its client base by doing a better job of selling the broadened offering, by getting its affiliate channel both excited about the product portfolio, and by upgrading the channel's ability to sell. For new customers, the vendor will still have to resolve the predicament of its association with the old, green-screen, AS/400 product. Despite IBM's efforts to counter the platform's image of being proprietary (even by renaming it into iSeries, i5, etc.), the market has been slow in warming up to it for e-business implementations. Namely, the initial price and the need for specially trained RPG development language administrators that are not that ubiquitous in the market like Microsoft Visual Basic (VB) programmers, have not really boded well for IBM's massive acceptance within the space. Moreover, overcoming the Microsoft barrier entry will likely be the major challenge, given Microsoft's ubiquitous position within the small and medium enterprise (SME) segment, particularly with products like Office, Exchange and SQL Server. Time will only tell how the equivalent counterpart products from IBM, such as Workplace, MQ Express or Connect Express will help in that regard.
This is Part Four of a four-part note.
Part One detailed recent announcements.
Parts Two and Three discussed the market impact.
Competitive Challenges
Also, as said earlier, the Microsoft-centric SMB application vendors understand this market and in addition to product offering, they have long heavily invested in recruiting, motivating, and supporting the resellers that service the segment. There are also influencers like certified public accountants (CPAs) and small and midsize accounting companies that make recommendations to their clients which packages to deploy, and Sage and ACCPAC have for decades been cultivating awareness and relationships within this community, which can be neither easily nor quickly toppled. Some of them also offer "no-frills" on-line or retail sold, entry level or "feeder" business-application packages that attract small businesses early on, such as BusinessWorks Gold, QuickBooks Premier, Peachtree, or ACCPAC Simply Accounting Pro, then these vendors provide more advanced functions and more scalable software as the small businesses grow.
Even in the case of an increased demand within the IBM technology-inclined prospective customers, PeopleSoft is not the only one "in bed" with IBM. For example, one will likely see on the standard menu a number of individual industry solutions (at least from MAPICS and SSA Global) that virtually offer similar solutions to World, ringing the similar rejuvenating changes of a web-based UI, WebSphere portal, and so on, while these products are also the incumbent veteran products in the segment. As some possible differentiation, the World Express solutions include the essential steps of the core business processes that almost any company in the targeted vertical markets would require. The configuration is designed to adapt to special customer requirements when needed, and expands to include additional functionality that is available in World Software. Tailoring the configuration will require additional consulting, but the PeopleSoft World management team believes that it will be faster and more cost-effective to tailor the existing image than to configure the entire system. This approach to implementation services gives the customer control over the amount of consulting needed to implement the software, allowing the customer to assess the relationship between cost and return on almost every significant implementation decision.
Yet, not all powerful and possibly exciting PeopleSoft Enteprise/PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne functionality that have been touted recently at the Leadership Summit (e.g., customer relationship management demand-driven manufacturing, diagnostics, predictive and prescriptive analytics, etc.) is available for World and World Express solutions, which may be a serious drawback when competing against the other vendors, which have long offered their entire suites without any disparity between solutions for bigger and smaller customers. Although PeopleSoft has been impressively moving quickly to create parallel products, transferring functionality among PeopleSoft, former JCIT's Demand Flow and former J.D. Edwards' products to fill existing gaps, many competitors offer these now within more homogenous product suites.
Therefore, the World Express solutions, while enabling PeopleSoft and its channel to offer a fixed price and fixed time implementation program in an "out-of-the-box" way, may not necessarily offer total extended-ERP functional scope, but still only a part of extended-ERP. 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. At this stage, the company officials admit only a "wait-and-see" stance to assess the need for eventual product enhancements in the above areas down the track. The situation is additionally aggravated by the fact that the World install base is still divided between the two different product releases, 7.3 and 8.1, which feature slightly different capabilities and are on different annual cumulative update tracks (e.g., the 6th annual cumulative update for 8.1 is slated for Q3 2004, whereas the 16th annual cumulative update for 7.3 is slated for Q1 2005).
SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/peoplesoft-revamps-world-for-its-mid-market-express-conquest-part-four-challenges-and-user-recommendations-17416/
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.
Although the World Express product is aimed at new, prospective customers (estimated 50,000 in North America), there may be an indirect importance of assuring the existing, still disheartened PeopleSoft World install base and channel of the product's brighter future. The product has undergone significant enhancements almost immediately after the merger, such as the integration with PeopleSoft EPM and the above-mentioned annual cumulative update for the release 7.3. Further, given that the integration with PeopleSoft SRM is slated for the end of 2004, and the next annual cumulative update should take place early in 2005, these events should be the best testimonials of the new owner's renewed commitment to the long neglected product line.
However, getting the market and the channel's mindset back into the more active selling of the product will not be that easy given a protracted limbo (PeopleSoft claims a few dozen new sales during 2003, without any significant orchestrated marketing and sales effort). No wonder then that the most likely torch bearing proponent at this stage will be IBM and its channel of iSeries resellers and distributors. Even pre-merger PeopleSoft and IBM have had some history since early in 2001. They announced a partnership to speed up the delivery of business applications for small and medium businesses (SMB), as PeopleSoft had early targeted IBM Business Partners to offer mid-market prospects a rapid deployment program for former PeopleSoft 8 (now PeopleSoft Enterprise) accelerated applications. The companies then announced Architecture Jumpstart, an ISO 9000 certified, rapid eBusiness deployment program designed for the fast implementation needs of mid-market customers. The pre-packaged turnkey solution included a workstation and an application and database server, all pre-bundled and offered with fixed pricing to deliver a completely installed and configured environment which includes demo, testing, training, and production databases.
Yet, it may still take some serious effort to produce a real magic bullet to attract the vast majority of smaller enterprises even with these latest initiatives. PeopleSoft needs to more efficiently mine its client base by doing a better job of selling the broadened offering, by getting its affiliate channel both excited about the product portfolio, and by upgrading the channel's ability to sell. For new customers, the vendor will still have to resolve the predicament of its association with the old, green-screen, AS/400 product. Despite IBM's efforts to counter the platform's image of being proprietary (even by renaming it into iSeries, i5, etc.), the market has been slow in warming up to it for e-business implementations. Namely, the initial price and the need for specially trained RPG development language administrators that are not that ubiquitous in the market like Microsoft Visual Basic (VB) programmers, have not really boded well for IBM's massive acceptance within the space. Moreover, overcoming the Microsoft barrier entry will likely be the major challenge, given Microsoft's ubiquitous position within the small and medium enterprise (SME) segment, particularly with products like Office, Exchange and SQL Server. Time will only tell how the equivalent counterpart products from IBM, such as Workplace, MQ Express or Connect Express will help in that regard.
This is Part Four of a four-part note.
Part One detailed recent announcements.
Parts Two and Three discussed the market impact.
Competitive Challenges
Also, as said earlier, the Microsoft-centric SMB application vendors understand this market and in addition to product offering, they have long heavily invested in recruiting, motivating, and supporting the resellers that service the segment. There are also influencers like certified public accountants (CPAs) and small and midsize accounting companies that make recommendations to their clients which packages to deploy, and Sage and ACCPAC have for decades been cultivating awareness and relationships within this community, which can be neither easily nor quickly toppled. Some of them also offer "no-frills" on-line or retail sold, entry level or "feeder" business-application packages that attract small businesses early on, such as BusinessWorks Gold, QuickBooks Premier, Peachtree, or ACCPAC Simply Accounting Pro, then these vendors provide more advanced functions and more scalable software as the small businesses grow.
Even in the case of an increased demand within the IBM technology-inclined prospective customers, PeopleSoft is not the only one "in bed" with IBM. For example, one will likely see on the standard menu a number of individual industry solutions (at least from MAPICS and SSA Global) that virtually offer similar solutions to World, ringing the similar rejuvenating changes of a web-based UI, WebSphere portal, and so on, while these products are also the incumbent veteran products in the segment. As some possible differentiation, the World Express solutions include the essential steps of the core business processes that almost any company in the targeted vertical markets would require. The configuration is designed to adapt to special customer requirements when needed, and expands to include additional functionality that is available in World Software. Tailoring the configuration will require additional consulting, but the PeopleSoft World management team believes that it will be faster and more cost-effective to tailor the existing image than to configure the entire system. This approach to implementation services gives the customer control over the amount of consulting needed to implement the software, allowing the customer to assess the relationship between cost and return on almost every significant implementation decision.
Yet, not all powerful and possibly exciting PeopleSoft Enteprise/PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne functionality that have been touted recently at the Leadership Summit (e.g., customer relationship management demand-driven manufacturing, diagnostics, predictive and prescriptive analytics, etc.) is available for World and World Express solutions, which may be a serious drawback when competing against the other vendors, which have long offered their entire suites without any disparity between solutions for bigger and smaller customers. Although PeopleSoft has been impressively moving quickly to create parallel products, transferring functionality among PeopleSoft, former JCIT's Demand Flow and former J.D. Edwards' products to fill existing gaps, many competitors offer these now within more homogenous product suites.
Therefore, the World Express solutions, while enabling PeopleSoft and its channel to offer a fixed price and fixed time implementation program in an "out-of-the-box" way, may not necessarily offer total extended-ERP functional scope, but still only a part of extended-ERP. 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. At this stage, the company officials admit only a "wait-and-see" stance to assess the need for eventual product enhancements in the above areas down the track. The situation is additionally aggravated by the fact that the World install base is still divided between the two different product releases, 7.3 and 8.1, which feature slightly different capabilities and are on different annual cumulative update tracks (e.g., the 6th annual cumulative update for 8.1 is slated for Q3 2004, whereas the 16th annual cumulative update for 7.3 is slated for Q1 2005).
SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/peoplesoft-revamps-world-for-its-mid-market-express-conquest-part-four-challenges-and-user-recommendations-17416/
