PeopleSoft product to be ‘Made in India’

BANGALORE: PeopleSoft is scaling up operations in India. It plans to invest up to $40 million in its Indian centers and will also ramp up recruiting operations.

And it will not be long before a PeopleSoft product is partly or wholly developed in India, just as components of Windows Server 2003 were developed out of Microsoft, Hyderabad. "We’ll beat Microsoft to it! They were here for 4 years and they developed a part of Win Server 2003. We will not take so long.", says Ram Gupta, PeopleSoft's executive vice president for products and technology

Following PeopleSoft’s merger with JD Edwards, its customers can now look forward to a more generous support policy for their applications. The new support plan also applies to all customers of J.D. Edwards. Gupta claimed that the sharing of intellectual property across product lines between J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft will result in better products.

PeopleSoft will now have three product families, PeopleSoft Enterprise, PropleSoft EnterpriseOne and PeopleSoft World. PeopleSoftOne is essentially a re-branded J.D.Edwards 9.0. PeopleSoft will however not introduce upgrades for PeopleSoft World, but will just maintain and update the product line for current customers. PeopleSoft World is a version of the J.D. Edwards application line that runs solely on the IBM AS/400 and has over 3000 customers.

PeopleSoft has announced a more "generous" support plan for both PeopleSoft and J.D.Edwards customers. It has now extended tax and regulatory updates from 4 years to 6 years and will continue to offer upgrade scripts to new versions for 5 years. Also, it will continue technical support for each release indefinitely.

If there is one thing that Oracle and PeopleSoft agree upon, that is their support for Linux. "We like Linux, it is shaping up very well", says Gupta. Just as Oracle has the "Unbreakable Linux’ initiative, PeopleSoft has partnerships with IBM and HP.

And PeopleSoft, which is now the second largest enterprise application provider in the world, is quick to dismiss the hostile bid from Oracle. "The Oracle saga is over", says Gupta.