PeopleSoft leaps on hosting bandwagon
PeopleSoft's (psft) announcement follows similar hosting plans made public over the past few weeks by a variety of software, hardware and services players, including SAP (sap), Oracle (orcl), Dell (dell), Gateway Inc. (gtw), EDS (eds) and others.
PeopleSoft is offering businesses of all sizes access to its own applications in a Web-hosting configuration starting Tuesday in North America. Applications will be hosted at Exodus data centers.
PeopleSoft will offer its human-resources, financial and e-procurement applications immediately. In the second half of the year it will add its CRM, e-store, enterprise management, supply chain and learning applications to the fold, officials said.
Every software company, from Microsoft to SAP, is anticipating the application service provider (ASP) business model will have a substantial impact on its bottom line in the not-too-distant future.
But PeopleSoft is especially bullish on the market, predicting that within two years, 40 percent to 50 percent of its software license revenues will come through hosting.
Initially, PeopleSoft will charge customers on a per-user/per-month basis. The company is looking into additional business-to-business pricing schemes that it may implement over time, officials said.
PeopleSoft is no newcomer to the ASP space. Through relationships with 11 hosting partners, the company has made its software available on a selective basis to Web users during the past two years. PeopleSoft officials claimed the company is not intending to muscle out these partners, most of whom provide non-PeopleSoft applications alongside PeopleSoft ones.
"We think our 11 partners will remain our strategic partners," said CEO and President Craig Conway. "They bring things we don't, like multiple vendor offerings ... and expertise in particular industries or verticals."
PeopleSoft announced its intentions to enter the hosting space last fall. Since then the company hired away Oracle's chief architect of Oracle's Business OnLine hosting initiative, Deepak Gupta, to build up PeopleSoft's hosting infrastructure. Several other former Oracle officials have joined the PeopleSoft eCenter team in the interim. Gupta said he is operating on the principle that "We want customers, not hostages."
He emphasized PeopleSoft's knowledge of its own applications, its plans to add vertical modules to its existing applications, and one-point accountability as the company's ASP selling points.