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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?"
...those people are so soft and squishy.
...Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own!
In other news, SuSe eyes Redhat customers, Carl Jrs eyes McDonalds' customers, and Bubs' Concessions Stand eyes Kmart customers.
"at any point we could be bought out by microsoft and your customer service could cease to exsist."
that'll learn all you blind-accept-button-pushers
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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.
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
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
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???
That's like saying 'serial killer eyes next victim.'
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.
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
Hmmm... with Microsoft web products, I often get 500 errors.
My employeer launched their new Peoplesoft HR website last month, and I 500 errors every couple of clicks...
So, since MS is really good at serving 500 errors, I'm sure they will be an excellent replacement for Peoplesoft's products.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
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.
Short version: PeopleSoft is ERP software that sits on top of just about any database out there (we run on top of Oracle where I work; I was working on top of SQL Server today in a class I'm taking. I know it runs on DB2, and it's built to be platform independent.) ERP software is what large and medium businesses (maybe small businesses too, but I don't see a small business tossing down a couple million to get a PS installation) use to track everything from the wage one gets paid to the pens used by the secretaries to the orders going out the door.
"ERP".
Bill, excuse yourself after you eat, please. Gosh. That's not right.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
...until Microsoft chooses a more pronounceable name than "Axapta".
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
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.
I hope PeopleSoft is wiped from the earth. I'd take Microsoft's unpleasant, buggy software over PeopleSoft's completely unusable atrocities any day.
Am I the only one left who has no fucking clue what PeopleSoft is
This is PeopleSoft:
You're looking for a job, and each of the potential employeers have a brand new Job website, but they all look strangly familar. You find job you like and decide to apply. You need to register for an account. Ok, type in Username, email address, password, and password again to verify.
Ok, it's sending an email to you to verify your email address. 5 minutes later, the email isn't there. An hour later you are still waiting. Hmmm... 2 hours later email still isn't there. OK, time to go outside. I'll apply for this job tomorrow.
Next day, you finally get an email from "Peoplesoft " with your account information. Great!
You log in, and fill out a couple small forms. Cool! They let you submit your resume and they'll automatically populate the webform using the contents of your resume! Oops! Your resume is in RTF or PDF format and their website only accepts MS Word documents. Fuck... but this is for a Unix sysadmin job. Ok, well I have a pirated version of MS Word around here somewhere...
So you reformat your resume using MS Word, and submit it to the Resume wizard. Dang, the stupid wizard put your job title as "TheLastCompany IworkedAt, Inc", the company name as "2003, 2004" and it trimmed off the last few lines describing all your job duties... dang I need to fix that up. Maybe it would have been better to type in all this stuff by hand in the first place...
WHen you're done with all the manual editing and hit the Submit button, you feel like you accomplished something.
And immediately afterwards, an email is sent to the HR STaff, and PeopleSoft has fucked up the formatting so much it looks worse then the ASCII rendering of the goatse.cx image... the HR assistant prints out your resume and adds it to the stack of 300 other resumes for a dozen different positions.
Later, you don't aren't considered for the job because you wrote a sentence in proper English like this:
"Researched, designed and configured web load balancing scheme using Apache webserver."
Some fucktard got the job instead, because they
wrote a resume to receive a high score with the keyword "Apache" and "Load balancing", like this:
"Researched load balancing scheme using Apache webserver"
"Designed load balancing scheme using Apache webserver"
"Configured load balancing scheme using Apache webserver"
"I'ma fucking apache god. APACHE APACHE APACHE APACHE"
That, my friend, is PeopleSoft.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Am I the only one left who has no fucking clue what PeopleSoft is or what Axapta is? Is this some sort of database thing?
Axapta is an ERP system. It was originally started in Denmark by a company called Damgaard. The company merged with Navision Software in 2000, and Navision was then purchased by Microsoft.
It's a powerful package; AFAIK it can run on either Oracle or SQL Server.
You can find a detailed review here or, if you only want the differences from other products, go here.
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.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Fleeing the oppressive Oracle to attain the safety of Microsoft seems to me like fleeing oppressive California for the safety of Stalinist Russia.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
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.
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.
MS has no credibility in the enterprise space.
None.
And they earned it, too.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Microsoft has announced an intent to pick up some of the PeopleSoft customers currently fleeing from possible support contract increases and an uncertain future
Because the future is always certian when it comes to Microsoft software products!
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."
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.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.