Looking to deliver on the promised benefits of its recent merger with J.D. Edwards & Co., PeopleSoft Inc. is shipping newly integrated products that exploit features from both companies' sets of software portfolios.
The Pleasanton, Calif.-based vendor yesterday announced that it is shipping seven offerings based on its PeopleSoft Enterprise and EnterpriseOne families, formerly PeopleSoft 8 and J.D. Edwards 5, respectively.
Since the merger closed last summer, PeopleSoft executives have been preaching that enterprise users, especially many of those that are already using PeopleSoft's core human resources or CRM software, will reap benefits from EnterpriseOne products. Those products cater to the manufacturing and real estate management industries, among others.
According to PeopleSoft Chief Technology Officer Rick Bergquist, the new offerings include an enhanced enterprise performance management application that can be used by J.D. Edwards customers. Using extract, transform and load (ETL) technology, EnterpriseOne-generated data can be loaded into the PeopleSoft data warehouse and exploited to get a view of business operations and then align them with strategic goals.
In addition, PeopleSoft Enterprise Strategic Sourcing is now integrated with the EnterpriseOne Procurement application. That means EnterpriseOne users, who typically deploy the applications at manufacturing plants, can now aggregate their purchases on a global basis, said Bergquist.
PeopleSoft appears to picking up the pace of its integration efforts, said Barry Wilderman, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group Inc. Overall, PeopleSoft is making good first steps, he said, doing things such as using ETL to create a central warehouse for data that can be used by both customer sets.
However, he cautioned that the metadata formatting may be sufficiently different to keep EnterpriseOne users from exploiting all of the Enterprise scorecard and other analytic capabilities. Wilderman advised customers to work closely with PeopleSoft to find out just how deep the application integration actually is and whether it really enables seamless process flows, such as order to cash.
As part of its integration effort, PeopleSoft also announced the following:
- Enterprise Order Capture has been integrated with EnterpriseOne Inventory and Order Management.
- Enterprise Human Resource Management is now linked with EnterpriseOne Financial Management.
- EnterpriseOne Advanced Planning is now integrated with Enterprise Supply Chain Management.
- EnterpriseOne Real Estate Management is now integrated with Enterprise Financial Management.
The products are all shipping as of Wednesday.