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Hmmmm. So you would never expect Oracle to THINK up a network computer? And since they are just a DB company, they would never branch out to doing business software, as well? And this must be true because ellis and Gates are SUCH good friends.

Ellis did the Think to get mindshare. Overall it lost money, but Ellis will tell you that it did make Oracle better known. Likewise, the buying of peoplesoft/jdedwards helped sales of the DB. If they can get Oracle OS out there and get themselves known as being an easy to use AND solid OS, it propogates throughout. In fact, there are some interesting marketing that they could do cheaply to gut MS's sql server.

I have watched a large organisation go through "hell on a stick" trying to make a PeopleSoft staff support product actually work. Years down the track and the human resource system is still over-promising and under-delivering.

The number of work-arounds needed by the staffing practitioners is unbelievable. That is where the innovation lies.

I suppose that I should not blame PeopleSoft too much. I can't remember actually speaking to any of their developers. However, it was probably the case that the sales talk had been so successful that the internal front-line people implementing the system had believed the pitch and then over-promised.

What we practitioners saw was the basic PeopleSoft product having to be heavily reworked for months and then years to make it do the kind of thing our organisation needed to do, and know about itself.

I kept wondering whether PeopleSoft had actually analysed our information requirement before tendering: I'm sure that our organisation would have explained its information requirement in tender documents, because that's how we do things.

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

I doubt it. Tuxedo and Jolt are tied into PeopleSoft's Application Server pretty tightly. It would require PeopleSoft to completely rebuild the App Server layer. Since this is a five year deal, that may happen over time, but I don't think you'll see it occur any time soon. As I recall, the existing WebSphere product that PeopleSoft delivers is nothing but a slimmed down web server (same with WebLogic). You were just getting a tool to throw up a few web pages, you weren't getting any of the funcitonality built within either WebLogic or WebSphere.

This deal appears to focus on the middleware layer. In other words, how you get PeopleSoft to integrate with every other system you are running.

This new deal lists a focus on the following products: WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Business Integration, WebSphere Business Integration Modeler and Monitor, WebSphere Application Server, and DB2.

Of the above, I have only ever worked with is a version of WBI (called WBI Connect Express) -- which is basically an http listener for XML messaging.

I think it's kind of cool. I'd love to move out of the ERP world and start learning some of these middleware tools.

PeopleSoft , vmware, HP, Trustix , MySQL , SAFLINK , FTI , Constant Data , SurfControl , Software AG , Agnitum , Volante , JBoss , FalconStor , Intershop, Tarantella, Software AG and Bull ,
etc..., etc..., etc...

Google is your friend: 703,000 for novell software partner. (0.58 seconds)

What sort of needs does a big business have? Well, they all need to manage human resources. Most need to track items in their warehouses and perhaps training for their employees. The industrial sector will have many additional needs to track equipment, schedule resources, control work authorizations, and safely take equipment in and out of service. Running an enterprise call system also takes more than a PHP app.

There are dozens of other highly generic needs that I haven't mentioned, but all take extensive effort to set up, customize, and integrate into a business environment. And these things are *mission critical*: millions of dollars can ride on the availability of the software. Open source can eventually get here, but it will have to (first) be written, (second) creep up through small business, and (third) be vetted and pushed by consultants who can make money from long-standing service contracts.

I'm not trying to be pessimistic about open source, but there are many unmet needs here. Don't expect to run a serious business without proprietary software. In fact, be as objective as possible when evaluating software needs for your business... pretend that you have to defend every decision in front of someone who doesn't care about the distiction b/t free and non-free software. Someone who only thinks in terms of money, growth potiential, implementation schedules, and risk. If OSS can't stand its ground here (even with the price advantage), drop it. Don't jeporadize your business, and (if you're working for someone else) don't give your boss a bad taste of what OSS is all about.

Stallman--as much as I support the guy--completely misses the real world when he says that "any business based on proprietary software deserves to fail". Deserving or not, any medium or large business that is not based on proprietary software will fail.

I hope open source can one day address these needs, especially for small businesses and start-ups, but I'm not too worried even if it can't. If Linux becomes good enough in other aspects, these proprietary apps will be made to run on Linux too (and some of them already do). "Mostly" free is good enough for me.

What's more interesting to me, though, is the lack of comment regarding Oracle's hostile takeover attempt of Peoplesoft, which prompted Peoplesoft to file suit. Note that the US DoJ and a couple of state AGs have become more interested in Oracle's tactics as well, and not a mention on /. Some article about 500 CDs gets mentioned and not Oracle? If you are not familiar with the situation, Ellison told the marketplace that after they do the takeover, Peoplesoft will be shut down. He has backpedaled since then.

Such is the tech business.

Peoplesoft seems pretty platform agnostic.

Sybase also offers the developer version of EAServer on two platforms.

I notice both these companies are focusing heavily on J2EE, is this a move away from IIS as an 'API'? This would seem to be a motivator for the .NET platform, are they going to have versions of their application servers available for .NET as it rolls out of beta? Or is Microsoft trying to stake a claim in some of that territory itself?

The process you go through says a lot about what measures they take to verify your identity, and I've inferred that a LOT of it CAN'T be done without human intervention (given the current state of technology) - and not without dedicated hardware in a centralized location. The "authority" part of "certificate authority" is by definition a single entity. They usually request a copy of your business' Certificate of Incorporation, which must be verified by a human being, and they always request a phone number for verification, and they usually request your company's DUNS number (Dun and Bradstreet's corporation database) for simplicity's sake. Verification of the DUNS is about the only thing that can be done automatically, and it's not sufficient to prove your identity, since anyone can look it up.
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Note that none of this reflects the opinions or views of my employer. Well actually it might, but I'm not allowed to say so.
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Wrong. Take PeopleSoft, a major ERP vendor, for example. It has a Windows interface that can be programmed via a drag-n-drop app builder that can also be used to generate Web-based 'self-service' apps. What does it use on the backend? An SQL database, the SQR scripting language for reports, and COBOL for the number crunching. The major thing keeping it from running the application server portion from running on linux is the lack of the necessary COBOL compiler.

Some people like to think COBOL is only for mainframes and written by old crusty programmers (and I do work with some old mainframe COBOL programmers). I know more COBOL programmers that are under 30 than I do the ones over 50. COBOL is still used for business because it was designed to fit the needs of business and has evolved to keep up with those needs. Like FORTRAN, it stays around because it works very well for what it was designed for. A huge codebase and lots of trained programmers also help, but they aren't the only factors.

BTW, there are at least two free (as in speech) COBOL projects in the works and have been posted to Slashdot in the past. Alan Cox is a contributor to one of them.

Some links to ERP vendors and what they have to say about Linux support:

• SAP has announced Linux support and has been shipping since August 25. Their Linux page is here.
  (Check out the cool penguin :-))
• Baan does not seem to have any public plans for Linux support. (Their web site does not have a search facility so it's hard to be sure, but they seem to be a Microsoft shop.) Does anybody know differently?
• J. D. Edwards has a very frustrating site which will lead you to a search page which promises that "to find what J.D.Edwards position is on the Linux operating system, type Linux in the field below and click Search". When I did this I got "no matching documents", so I assume they don't have a position.
• PeopleSoft does not mention Linux on their site, so it is probably safe to assume that they do not support it.

So, answering my previous question, it seems like Kenwood is limited to choose between SAP and SAP.