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Home > AS/400 News > Will Fusion satisfy JDE and PeopleSoft customers? |
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It might not be the panacea J.D. Edwards (JDE) and PeopleSoft customers were looking for, but Oracle Corp. hopes that they see its newly branded Fusion Middleware as a start. Oracle's Project Fusion is the company's initiative to integrate applications and customers it acquired recently through the purchase of PeopleSoft Inc., retail software maker Retek Inc., security firm Oblix and others. Fusion middleware will be the first product from that initiative and will eventually be the underlying infrastructure for all its applications. Most JDE and PeopleSoft customers will have to wait and see what this means. But their vendor being sold -- not once, but twice in the case of JDE -- may have some users wondering what their enterprise resource planning (ERP) investment is now worth. Philip Howard, a research director with Towcester, England-based Bloor Research, said the move is a result of the flack former JDE and PeopleSoft customers have given Oracle over fears they won't get sufficient support now that they're in the Oracle fold. The company wanted to make sure it acknowledged those concerns. ((Content component not found.)) "What Oracle is saying is that we've tested [JDE and PeopleSoft] in labs with Oracle [applications] and it works and we're prepared to support them. Beyond that, it doesn't mean anything," Howard said. The real issue is Oracle's plans for a road map for JDE and PeopleSoft customers. According to Oracle, certifying JDE and PeopleSoft applications with Fusion middleware gives customers a wider array of tools to work with because they can now integrate existing applications with Oracle's middleware products. "They'll lose people in the short term, …. [but] I'd be surprised if they do in the long run," Howard said. "They've got a reasonable amount of time if they continue to develop the products, but they're going to have to publish a serious road map sometime in the next few months." Oracle has time, Howard said, because the upheaval of moving to another platform will keep most JDE and PeopleSoft customers on board long enough to give Oracle a chance to prove it has tangible support plans. Time is a luxury Oracle can afford in the short term, but unless it can provide a solution that will satisfy JDE and PeopleSoft customers' concerns moving forward, there will be no shortage of competitors trying to poach them, including smaller companies. Andy Klee, president of Klee Associates Inc., an ERP consulting firm based in Cedaredge, Colo., expects up to 25% of the acquired customers to leave within the next year. Klee said some customers may start licensing maintenance to third-party companies like his to save money. However, if they decide to go that route they will not be able to get updates. According to Klee, JDE's World software for the iSeries is very clean and is easy for a third-party vendor to manage, while PeopleSoft's EnterpriseOne has too much middleware. Big companies are also paying attention to this trend. SAP AG recently purchased TomorrowNow, one of Klee's competitors in the third-party support market, and that is just the beginning of the pressure the German giant is willing to apply to get customers to leave Oracle. According to Jon Reed, a consultant with SAPtips, SAP's Safe Harbor program, for example, was targeted at JDE and Oracle users, and it didn't capture a lot of accounts out of the gate. Companies that reevaluate their ERP systems because of Project Fusion are going to take a long, hard look at other vendors.
"Those people are going to be attacked by SAP on the top end and Microsoft at the bottom end, and anyone else who wants to stick their fingers in … [Oracle] is going to have to monitor this carefully," Howard said. Let us know what you think about the story; e-mail: Luke Meredith, News Writer
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