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?"

Comments

competition is good, usually

[crimethinker]

In general, if Microsoft is more competitive with its products, that will force PeopleSoft to improve theirs, or stop gouging for support contracts, or whatever.

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.

Don't get me wrong - I like competition, but I like fair competition, based on merits. It reminds me of my high-school football team; the football was some sort of "regulation size and colour," and so the high school chose its school colours such that one of them matched the ball colour perfectly. When we played home games, we got to pick whether we would wear the light or the dark-coloured jerseys, and of course, we chose the ones that matched the ball. It made it very difficult for the other players to tell who had the ball, and made diversionary fakes a lot easier. When we played away, our opponents would choose the dark colour, so that our team wore the light (and very contrasting) colour jerseys. Net result? We won a lot more home games, and by higher margins. Hardly what I'd call "fair."

Mod this -1, Long-winded.

-paul

Re:competition is good, usually

[generic-man]

I was under the impression that Apple killed BeOS. Be Inc. wanted the specs on the G3 (G4?) processor, and Apple wouldn't let Be create a commercial operating system that would run on Apple hardware.

I invested in Be Inc., and I've learned my lesson from the experience. Never invest in a company run by a crazy Frenchman like Jean-Louis Gassée.

Choose open source ERP

[iPaqMan]

Corporations loath vendor lock-in as much as you or I. Why haven't open source ERP packages, like compiere (http://www.compiere.org/), taken off???

Re:Microsoft? ERP?

[cbelt3]

Yeah sure. Like they did so well with Microsoft Money. Let's face it- they don't know beans about financial software, much less ERP. And they don't have the galactic network of partners and pimps like the other bigs do. So they'll jump in, lose their assets, and jump out. Like they always do. Windows, Office. That's pretty much it.

Kuali Project

[flacco]

two universities are working on an "open-ish" source alternative to PeopleSoft:

http://www.kualiproject.org/

if a university's going to move off of peoplesoft, and they can stick it out, this might be a safer move than signing in blood with MS.

Re: You MUST be clueless

[theAtomicFireball]

the original poster wasn't failing to appreciate MS's enterprise experience, they were noting that Microsoft has little credibility in the Enterprise Applications space - and Enterprise Applications are not just applications run in an Enterprise.

MicroSoft has very little credibility in this space and almost no presence among the larger ERP implementations. You are just as clueless or misinformed as you accuse the original poster of being.

Although I'm no fan of SQL Server, I have to disagree with the original poster's statement in one regard, however. SQL2k has been gaining credibility rapidly in the Enterprise Application space (including as a back-end for PeopleSoft). It's gained considerable ground on Oracle in certain portions of the marketspace, although it's nowhere near overtaking them.

We use Axapta where I work.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I have to honestly say it is one of the smelliest turds of a piece of software that I have ever had the displeasure to be saddled with.

Here's a quick example: you open a list of 1000 items that are displayed in a grid. You want to see the 500th item. You'd think that you just grab the scroll bar and scroll down to the middle, right? WRONG!!! That will take you to about record 20. If you want to go the the 500th item, you'll have to hit PgDn about 100 times. And each time you hit PgDn, you'll have to wait about half a second for the grid to redraw. If you have your doctorate in mathematics you might be able to figure that you're looking at about a minute to just to scroll down a short list of items. Seriously. And it's all like that. I don't know how people write software that badly.

I've never used Peoplesoft, but I cannot imagine that it is even conceivable that it could be any worse than Axapta.

Let Microsoft play for tablescraps

[Perdo]

The biggest player in the market is not Oracle, its pawn Peoplesoft or Microsoft.

The biggest player is SAP, and they will be extracting their due.