PeopleSoft Technology Blog

I had been talking to some customers and partners recently about PeopleTools and their own development roadmaps. The customer's were concerned that some of the integrated products they use would not be supported and the some partners had redeployed their PeopleSoft Business Interlink integration development.

This came about because of a number of mixed messages, "Business Interlinks is deprecated", the "only integration technology is web services" amongst others.

While partners and customers are being encouraged to move integrations to web services based integrations, Business Interlinks technology is still supported, both on 32 bit and 64 bit platforms. Oracle's PeopleSoft went to 64-bit only on HP-UX, Solaris and AIX with the release of PeopleTools 8.48. Check the Supported Platforms pages on Customer Connection for more platform information.

Greg Kelly and I had a conversation the other day about this recent BusinessWeek article.  It's a somewhat interesting story about the recent re-organization within the Oracle Applications division and BW's views about Oracle's application strategy - including Fusion.

I found it particularly interesting because it's so full of misleading or misguided statements that are made in such a way as to sound informational and journalistic.  I understand that BW may be trying to summarize for a lay audience a complex market landscape and necessarily complicated strategy.  To a degree they've been successful.  The article reads well with no evident spin.  It sounds informational.

Unfortunately, some of the information is simply incorrect.  One statement in particular comes to mind:  "Oracle risks losing ground to SAP and Salesforce.com, both of which have been quicker to deliver Web-based versions of enterprise software".  For one, PeopleSoft 8 was released long before Salesforce.com was a glint, but this bit of editorial license leads the reader to think that we're only just now, with Fusion, planning to release a Web-based version of our applications. 

Worse is the summary of our Fusion strategy in which they indicate Oracle will "cherry-pick the best of [our] software collection ... including Oracle's own accounting software, PeopleSoft's human resources product and Siebel's customer management application."  This statement leaves the reader to assume we are cobbling together applications that already exist and "unifying an approach to storing data and interacting with the programs". 

It's unfortunate that a publication such as BusinessWeek hasn't done a better job of ensuring their material is correct and accurate.  On the other hand, it's our job to ensure that our strategy is dead-simple and easy for our customers (and editors who only do half a job with their homework) to understand.