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Microsoft Eyes PeopleSoft Customers
An anonymous reader writes "According to a couple articles, Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future. What does it mean for the landscape of the ERP market if Microsoft starts being more competitive with its Axapta product?"
What ERP software does Microsoft have which is even capable of playing in this space? The products they acquired after the Great Plains acquisition certainly aren't (speaking as somebody who had to administer said package for several years in the early 21st century.)
One presumes MS know what they're doing, but this is certainly a weird gambit.
You're doing it wrong.
What about those of us using oracle behind our Higher Ed information systems. Supposedly it's already been designed to run on SQL Server so I guess MS doesn't even have to eye us, we are jumping in with both feet. Unless Oracle just plans to shut down that portion of Peoplesofts products, that's probably what will happen to us.
Nice, but Microsoft has always been traditionally lax on its enterprise business software side. CRM, ERP and accounting stuff have never been its strongpoint. While it's bought itself into these markets in recent years (Great Plains acquisitions etc.) it's not got to the point where it's fully integrated these bought-in products into its product line successfully.
So while they could hoover up fleeing Peoplesoft customers, they're currently not selling them a de facto MS product. Some might see this as good, but in all honesty, recently acquired software tends to be the old stuff with a sticker on it.
The MS selling point of full integration with other MS products won't be there yet, at least not in current versions...
I don't see what's special about this... it makes normal business sense to pick up customers that may be becoming available... it's not even typically unethical in my opinion.
see a Text Widget
The Microsoft offer "is barely worth the paper the press release was written on," Shepherd said. I think the end of the article sums it up succinctly.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Few other companies care to use FUD marketing of the sort Microsoft is the master of. Novel may indeed want Red Hat customers, but they are not going to make an announcement of Red Hat's impending doom that will be echoed by an unbelievable chorus of PC pulp pushers and pundits with Dido qualifications. The uncertainty here is about as manufactured as IBM's supposed abandonment of OS/2 before M$ was able to get it's next OS in order. In that case, the same pundits did the same kind of echoing and were dead wrong. IBM's sales of OS/2 were greater than any other software available at the time and they held onto OS/2 for years and several releases afterwards.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Whilst corporations loathe vendor lockin, they love accoutability, especially for huge, towering vertical monoliths of software packages such as ERPs.
If my ERP breaks, I don't have time to read mailing lists and ask in IRC channels for somebody to help me write a patch. I want a butt connected with my boot, preferably somebody senior representing the vendor, and then I want a fix available in a time which meets my SLA.
Anything less is unacceptable.
You're doing it wrong.
This is the same reason I'm most worried about EA/vivendi's little slurping sprees trying to eat up the gaming industry. Unnatural consolidation in any market helps no one but the largest consolidated players.
In particular, consolidation in an industry helps Microsoft. Only a healthy market can resist takeover by Microsoft, and vice versa.
...applaud our new ERP overlords. The current players in the field are a blight on the entire IT industry. Has anyone EVER seen a large ERP deployment come in anywhere close to budget, schedule or requirements? This whole sector represents the absolute worst of IT consulting: unfulfilled promises, bloated billings, incompetent staff and crap products. As far as I can tell, the big players keep getting these contracts simply because they are the biggest and not because they have ever produced anything worthwhile.
At best, I consider MS to provide a good prototyping environment and an acceptable, if buggy, desktop. That said, even their products would be a great improvement over the state of that particular sector and it seems that only IBM and MS are big enough to convince the PHBs that they are viable alternatives.
Try listening to music without an iPod - Easy
Try using the Internet without Google - Easy
Try buying a new PC without Windows - Impossible
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.
Try plugging in a MuVo in an Apple machine running iTunes.
...]
... them bastards! I'll never forgive them for such a crime...
Uh, oh! Surprise, it works! It even has it's own little icon (of course it's a brown little turd compared to the shiny white iPod icon)!
Poor thing, it asks me to sync all my library with the MuVo (it won't fit dear!) So I manage the playlists manually... and it works! Sheesh, would you believe it? Out of the box, no drivers, no frills... just the Apple experience, with the competition's hardware.
Oh, it can't play m4a and m4p... but, hey! the MuVo doesn't support it in the first place... should Apple flash it (if it were possible) on the fly to give it a chance against the iPod?
In any case, wasn't the iTMS a device to increase iPod sales? So tell me, why is iTunes integration working so well with competing hardware? Come on, I'm listening... can't hear you...
[... silence
You see... the iPod is simply unbeatable... it just works, Apple doesn't need sleazy tactics to help the bottom line. It floats on its own.
About Google... well, you can use askjeeves... or altavista... why aren't you? Perhaps because they don't hold a candle against almighty google? Thought so...
M$ on the other hand KILLED BeOS (amongst other things)
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
To be more precise people love the illusion of accountability. If your ERP breaks peoplesoft will not do anything for you. You will though get to blame them to the board and they won't hear you cos they are sleeping or scheming to rip off the shareholders.
evil is as evil does
The MS CRM offering doesn't come close to PeopleSoft or SAP. I am a senior programmer for a fortune 500 with 140,000 employees. We recently finished a _very_ long deployment of PeopleSoft HR and PeopleSoft Portal. We looked at what MS had to offer and it didn't even come close. We looked at SAP and we looked at Oracle. All of our mission critical data is in Oracle and the not-to-important-data is in SQL Server or a few MySQL databases. We were actually leaning toward Oracle's product (because we use it as our critical DB), however they didn't have a few _very_ important functionalities that we need for our HR processes, so that left PeopleSoft and SAP.
Converting your whole HR/payroll process (especially when you pay 140,000+ employees every week) to any other system takes a ton of time and a ton of cash. We spent tens of millions on these two systems. There is no way in the world we would redo everything in an MS product.
Our systems are running great. We are about 2 versions behind on the latest PeopleSoft releases. We will probably just upgrade to the last PeopleSoft release and leave it alone. Every upgrade costs tons of money and time.
There is also the fact that were I work, all of our financial data and warehouse is _only_ in Oracle. Will the MS product allow you to work with a non-SQL Server DB (I doubt it)? There is no chance in H-E-L-L that we would take our critical data out of Oracle and put it in MS SQL Server. Then there is the issue of what technology MS built their system on. It has been out for a while, so I will assume it is in old ASP? No thank, we don't want that crap on our network. Java or ASP.Net/C# only please.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
It might work with the MuVo, there's plenty it doesn't work with. But that's not the point, the point is whether Apple sold music (from iTMS) will play on any other player. No it won't. Reason? Apple don't want it to. They are being sued for exactly those uncompetitive practises right now.
You see... the iPod is simply unbeatable... it just works
Unless you want it to "work" for more than a few hours, or "work" with an OS other than Win/Mac, or "work" with additional music formats like OGG or FLAC, or "work" with albums that don't have gaps between tracks. That last one is a killer, my 5 year old $40 CD player works better than an iPod in that respect.
Apple doesn't need sleazy tactics to help the bottom line. It floats on its own.
Apple got the iPod to where it is today by a combination of excellent product design, fantastic advertising, great product placement and good timing. Not by any kind of technical merit. The current 4gen iPods offer virtually nothing in the way of significant features over the original, and are way behind almost all of their competitors.
I wish Apple luck, and they deserve all the success they are having, but many of us know the iPod is like the XP of the mp3 player world, it's shiny, it's easy to use, but underneath it's less than impressive.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Well there are some slight differences.
.DOC format then a PDF. Go to the store almost all the programs are for Windows. Anyone who makes a product that would compete with Microsoft direction Microsoft will make people fear their product or force manufactures to drop it. While it is getting better we still need Microsoft to complete parts of our lives. While we can listen to music in many different ways.
First Microsoft vs. Apple Ipod. The I Pod is a Music Player. Although Nice to have it is not a necessity to most peoples everyday life. While Microsoft windows has became more of an infrastructure to daily life for home and business it is much like the telephone system now. People need to write papers and more accept the
Microsoft vs. Google. Windows Cost money to legally operate, Word costs money. Google is a free service. If a better services comes along people would switch. It is also a thing that we are not forced to use google at most work places. You are free to go to yahoo or others.
In some ways you are right the reason is that Apple and Google haven't been sued for antitrust suits yet. But the reason is that they haven't been sued is because they haven't broken any anti-trust laws. Having 90% market share alone doesn't make you a monopoly. Having 90% market share and actively stopping consumers from switching is.
Think of this senerio...
GM has 90% of the market share of cars. But the other 10% are using other consumers. Ok GM is just a popular car. But if they switched to Ford they will still be able to ride the same roads fill at the same gas station.
But if GM was like Microsoft, The majority of the infrastructure roads, gas stations will only work for GM cars, And if the competitor made there vehecials compatible they will get sued out of business because of 1 GMs size and 2 they own the rights on all the specs so making a copy will break patented etc.
So the other cars will end up more expensive to run because they are forced to drive around the GM infrastructure.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Once you get past the OS and the Internet Information Server, MS has ZERO hold on the horizontal server enterprise application market, so any competition they can bring is by definition "fair". As fair as anything Oracle and SAP will let them get away with. If it brings costs down for the end-user, that's only good for the end-user.
Never ceases to amaze me how many folks want commercial grade support, for open source products, but, want it for free. Folks serious about using open source, pay monthly retainers to open source developers. For that, they get industrial grade software, with lots of input to the development direction, and in general, support is only a phone call or email away.
Wait now, we use use PSFT in house! Doh!
In all seriousness, i'm not that impressed with peoplesoft... We use the HR, Helpdesk and eRecruit packages... I've been the prime DBA for the latter two. You can say what you want about Oracle products being complex, unwieldy but it provides tremendous flexibility. If you know what your doing there's a ton of stats and debugging info available to you. Psft on the other hand is an absolutely nightmare to tune.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Anything less is unacceptable.
As another poster says, it's all about passing the buck.
I've been on the client and vending end of hundreds of support contracts.
Hardware support contracts can be expensive but are worthwhile if uptime is critical, mainly because you tend to get fast access to spare parts.
Software support contracts however are a complete waste of time and money. About all they're good for is couriering replacement media. If the software has a heisenbug it will never be fixed ("we can't reproduce that bug"). If it has a design bug it will never be fixed ("that's not a bug"). If it has a functional bug that requires more than a one line change it will never be fixed ("here's a really hacky workaround. Oh, you're already doing that?"). If it has a functional bug that can be fixed with a one line change then, if you're lucky, you'll see it in the next major release of the software in 6 months time, at the same time as the other customers not on a support contract ("we're regression testing the fix ...").
If you don't have the expertese to support it yourself then you certainly don't have the expertese to know when your vendor is bullshitting you. As they certainly will because they're trying to maximise their profit and minimise their costs after getting their hooks into you.
Employing a third-party part/full timer for software support is far more cost effective, flexible and fast.
Open source wins for support. People who talk about closed source software vendor support contracts being worthwhile are either clueless or in marketing.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.