PeopleSoft chief addresses users in SAP’s homeland

Even if his company remains an Oracle Corp. acquisition target, PeopleSoft Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer Craig Conway savors every opportunity to sell his company’s products and services to IT executives, especially those located in the home market of arch rival SAP AG.

“I’m glad to be here, deep within the enemy territory of SAP,” Conway said Monday in a keynote speech delivered at the annual Strategic IT Management conference in Neuss, Germany. SAP is based in Walldorf, Germany.

Eager to highlight the competitiveness of PeopleSoft, Conway drew a comparison between the European aircraft manufacturer, Airbus Industrie SA, and its U.S. rival, The Boeing Co. The Europeans challenged the dominant U.S. aircraft builder by delivering planes that offered superior technology, cost less and required lower maintenance, according to the software executive. For the first time last year, Airbus beat Boeing to become the world’s leading supplier of passenger airplanes, he said.

“PeopleSoft is challenging SAP just as Airbus has challenged Boeing — with innovation, lower cost of ownership and less costly maintenance,” Conway said.

One factor that Conway neglected to mention, however, was the huge political and financial support from the governments of France, Germany, Spain and the U.K. for the European aircraft manufacturing venture. Without that support, Airbus would arguably have had a tougher time pushing Boeing from its leading market position.

Nevertheless, Conway called Airbus “a fabulous success story” and one that PeopleSoft aims to emulate.

Looking back, Conway said enterprise applications have come a long way — from helping enterprises initially crunch numbers in their financial, personnel and manufacturing departments to connecting these applications via the Internet to be accessed anywhere in the world from any Web device.

The next wave of technology, he said, is the fully Internet-based user portal offering real-time information, embedded analytic functions and relevant roles-based content, which, essentially, allows users to see only data they’re supposed to see. These new enterprise applications, he added, have gone from initially offering “transactional efficiency” to IT departments to providing a wealth of Web services to all users across the enterprise as well as their external suppliers.

Addressing a sensitive issue with German IT executives hard hit by the economic downturn, Conway said enterprise applications have traditionally been expensive. “Enterprise applications require a lot of people to handle installation, configuration, implementation, updates, integration and more,” he said. “Now it’s time to have technology do more of what people have to do today.”

To that end, around half of PeopleSoft’s software programmers are working on making applications easier for customers, according to Conway. Among the goals: one-day installations, updates without bringing the production system down and embedded performance monitors for users to check how the system is performing.

The need for fewer hands to tinker with software lowers costs, as PeopleSoft has demonstrated over the past three years, according to Conway. “When I joined the company in 1999, the ratio of implementation costs to software license costs was 4 to 1,” he said. “It’s 2 to 1 today.”

In addition to its lower license costs, PeopleSoft is winning customers over with its flexibility in coping with changing business processes and system components, according to Conway. “We are widely know as being more flexible than SAP,” he said, adding that numerous German companies have become PeopleSoft customers for this very reason.

The list of big German customers includes BMW AG, DaimlerChrysler AG, Deutsche Bank AG and Lufthansa AG.

The Strategic IT Management conference was sponsored by the German business newspaper Handelsblatt and The Wall Street Journal.