30 April 2002 Enterprise business software supplier PeopleSoft used its Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada this week to announce 12 new products that are ready for delivery as part of its PeopleSoft 8 enterprise business suite.
The products, which span customer relationship management (CRM), human resources and supply chain management, will put further pressure on the best-of-breed software suppliers in these areas, most notably Siebel, Ariba and Commerce One, each of which has recently posted poor sales and losses.
The announcements will enable PeopleSoft to “maintain its leadership in the real-time enterprise”, CEO Craig Conway told an audience of more than 2,500 executives in a bullish speech.
He once again outlined the company’s vision of supplying highly integrated systems that enable customer’s to react in “real time”. Conway also made light of the company’s own recent profit warning, suggesting that Wall Street had over-reacted to the news.
In a move that echoes Siebel’s increasing vertical market focus, six of the announcements were for specialist CRM modules – for financial services, telecommunications, government, insurance, energy and high technology.
In supply chain management, PeopleSoft is now offering a complete “source to settle” software support with the announcement of a new strategic sourcing product.
Conway said that rivals – presumably Commerce One and Ariba – had promoted this vision but “did not have the components and those they did have did not integrate very well”. It also introduced a trading partner management product, for monitoring partner performance, and an ‘intelligent context manager’.
Three new products were announced in the human resources area. Sales incentive management is for managing payment and commission of sales staff; Performance Management is to monitor employees performance against corporate objectives; and Enterprise Learning management is to manage employee’s training throughout their career.
PeopleSoft’s also claimed that it is the first company to use web services “as the primary integration technology”. The company showed current and emerging software that uses core web services standards such as XML, SOAP and UDDI.
