Analysis: PeopleSoft users speak out about Oracle takeover

The great debate over the impact of Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft has all the big industry analyst organizations weighing in. However, in most of the analysis one group’s opinion seems to have been overlooked: that of PeopleSoft users.

What follows is a sampling of recent PeopleSoft user comments, e-mailed to InfoWorld, on many of the issues surrounding Oracle’s hostile takeover.

Most of the users asked InfoWorld not to publish their name or company. In that spirit, the editors have deleted all references in case a letter writer regrets it later.  

The main concern voiced by most of the users was around the issue of support. Some questions included who had the better support and what strategy should users follow once support was taken over by Oracle?

One e-mail writer analyzed the situation and determined there are three possible responses on the part of users.

“Once the dust has cleared, I suspect the Oracle definition of support will be to provide a migration path to their own applications. This will lead to one of three responses by customers:

* Resignation — many customers will quietly make the switch because it is the cheapest alternative. I am sure that Oracle will provide a lot of support to encourage this.

*  Rebellion — some customers will look for third-party support solutions. This will be especially true for customers with customized applications or bolt-ons.

* Defection — those customers with not a lot of investment in customizations, that do not find the functionality that they want in Oracle, will look elsewhere.”

The idea of third-party support seemed to be on the minds of a lot of PeopleSoft users. If this is truly indicative of a trend, it could spell trouble for Oracle in the future if they are counting on a strong support revenue stream.

“I think third-party support may be the route to go, and it could save a lot of money,” one user commented.

“My client is likely to milk whatever support Oracle provides for as long as possible then seek out third-party support,” said another PeopleSoft user.

But there were also plenty of users who were leaning toward Oracle. Here’s a sample of those.

“Many years ago Oracle acquired a competitor’s relational database management system product named RDB. It still supports it. As for whether it will be able to support it as well as or better than PeopleSoft, that depends on whether there will be massive defections in PeopleSoft’s support organization or not.”

“I’m not so impressed with PeopleSoft support anyway. They may have improved their support service since the war started, but then again at the end of the day, all the big corporations are all the same.”

Here’s one writer with a very specific gripe. He claims Oracle shouldn’t have much to do to keep the level of support similar to PeopleSoft, which according to him left a lot of room for improvement.

“I filed a support case where values were being dropped by the eRecruit application, and a person in PeopleSoft support stated that a sharp applicant would notice that data had been dropped and would re-enter it.

My reply to him was a sharp programmer would have caught the problem and fixed it.

So in my opinion PeopleSoft leaves a lot of room to improve and hopefully the acquisition by Oracle will bring some positive changes in personnel in the support area.”

All of the e-mailers but one said companies should take a wait-and-see attitude before transitioning to Oracle.

The one exception thought there might be incentives now that won’t be there later.

“Wait and see what methods, tools Oracle has to offer to migrate to their products which might be available to all PeopleSoft customers for free. If you migrate later, it could end up being more costly,” the writer said.

“If you are in the middle of implementing some new modules, I recommend the business cases for them be reviewed and updated.”

Here’s a sober and rational look at the migration issue from the University of Oklahoma.

“PeopleSoft was a major investment for the University to switch over from legacy systems. PeopleSoft was chosen as it was felt it had the best product to support the University’s needs. We are currently in the middle of an upgrade from HRMS 8.3 SP1 to Human Capital 8.8 SP1.

“We are going to continue with this upgrade as scheduled and not make any drastic decisions at this time. These systems are major investments and involve time, labor, and decisions that cannot be made on the spur of the moment. To go with another product one has to consider the time and training involved to move to another product.”

Others were equally conservative in their opinions on migrating, but all offered some additional suggestions.

“If your company is forced to upgrade the database platform/server platform by IT, then looking at other ERPs is a good choice.”

“Continue on with PeopleSoft if all you are doing is patches/tools upgrades that need to be done. These are things that take less than 3 months to implement. Adding new functionality, like turning on AP module when AR/GL/Billing are already in production, requires a licensing agreement but I would say it’s a small change in the big overall picture.”

As to who makes the better product? PeopleSoft was the winner hands down. And this e-mail writer probably expresses the sentiment of most.  

“Essentially it is a case of taking a product that was eating Oracle’s lunch and getting it off the market. That will not improve the Oracle product itself, so that the net result will be more wins for SAP.”

“Remember, most PeopleSoft customers considered Oracle before their purchase and made a choice based upon their requirements. We went through a comparison of Oracle and PeopleSoft systems 18 months ago and decided to continue investing in PeopleSoft. The issues surrounding that decision have not changed yet.”

Finally, most of the e-mail writers wished the takeover never happened, and this user comment pretty much sums up the negative feelings PeopleSoft users have about it.

“The main idea behind acquisition is when you can’t compete then buy it and later dump it. Also note that Oracle has said they will not stop with PeopleSoft and there will be more acquisitions, which says they just want monopoly.”