6 May 2003 Reflecting increased acceptance of Linux by corporate and public sector customers, business applications software vendor PeopleSoft has announced it is porting its entire portfolio of products to the open source operating system.

Addressing customers at its US Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, company executives outlined plans to extend support for Linux to the company’s core enterprise resource planning products, including financials, manufacturing, HR and CRM, by the fourth quarter of 2003.

Executives said it would initially offer its applications on the Red Hat distribution of Linux and highlighted how the company is using IBM’s servers and systems software as its development platform for the new implementations.

To this point, PeopleSoft has been something of a laggard in the Linux field. Currently its Linux commitment extends only to supporting the Linux versions of BEA Systems’ WebLogic and IBM’s WebSphere web servers, as well as the IBM DB2 database.

Other business applications software vendors, notably SAP and Oracle, have been busy porting many of their core modules to Linux for a number of years. In the opinion of PeopleSoft executives, customers can now confidently use Linux as the base for their “mission-critical” applications.

While the Linux options are designed to cut customers’ total cost of deploying PeopleSoft applications, the company stresses that it will continue to offer versions of software for Windows and Unix systems. From PeopleSoft’s point of view, widespread Linux adoption will help it reduce support and porting costs.