April 26, 2006

Unlimited Enhancements?

Oracle has announced that it will continue to support and enhance its current applications (Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel) beyond the release of the Fusion product line. The Fusion applications would then become just another product line, and not a forced upgrade path. This would leave Oracle with five separate products to be supported on an ongoing basis.

This seems to be quite a change from the original situation, in which Oracle's plans appeared to be to acquire PeopleSoft just to get its customers, shutting down the PeopleSoft line and migrating the customers to the Oracle product. That changed to a plan to support existing PeopleSoft installations for a while. Later, Oracle promised to support PeopleSoft until 2013. The latest announcement would seem to drop even the 2013 deadline.

How can this be done? Oracle says that the scale of its installed base ("30,000 satisfied customers" across the four existing lines) allows it to continue to invest in the applications. Of course Oracle would prefer to migrate customers to Fusion, but it is now specifically offering continued new releases and no forced upgrades.

I admit to being surprised by this and hope that it helps to extend the expected lifetimes of our PeopleSoft installations.

Until next time...