PeopleSoft Extends Industry Leadership in Delivering Total Ownership Experience; New Technology to Accelerate Upgrades, Ease Business Process Integration

Business Wire, Sept 21, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO -- Today at its Connect 2004 user conference, PeopleSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq:PSFT) announced significant new technologies, extending the company's leadership in delivering the leading total ownership experience for enterprise applications. One of the new technologies introduced, PeopleSoft(R) Accelerated Upgrade, will dramatically change the way customers upgrade their enterprise applications. The solution will reduce upgrade time by 25 to 40 percent and decrease downtime to migrate to new releases by 66 percent. A second technology introduced today is PeopleSoft Interactive Services Repository, a comprehensive directory of business process integration points that will further reduce the challenges associated with application integration in a heterogeneous software environment. PeopleSoft's Total Ownership Experience initiative, launched in May 2003, transforms the way customers implement, use, and maintain software, significantly driving down the time and costs associated with owning enterprise applications.

"IT organizations are under intense pressure to meet increasing user expectations with ever-decreasing resources," said Ram Gupta, executive vice president, PeopleSoft Products and Technology. "The new products announced today will completely revolutionize the upgrade process for customers and reduce software integration complexity, driving down the cost and time to implement enterprise software. These new technologies widen our lead in providing the best Total Ownership Experience in the industry."

Accelerated Upgrade to Reduce Upgrade Time by 25 to 40 Percent

PeopleSoft Accelerated Upgrade will significantly change the enterprise application upgrade process. Until now, enterprise application upgrades required customers to copy their old production system onto a backup server and then migrate the new software release functionality. With PeopleSoft's new Accelerated Upgrade, customers will only need to copy their application customizations and data to the new release.

Four tools will automate the new upgrade process, including a new visual comparison tool to identify customizations, a customization migration tool, a new data transformation and migration tool, and PeopleSoft's Change Assistant update tool that automatically transfers maintenance updates to the new release. As a result, the time to upgrade to a new software release will be reduced by 25 to 40 percent. Additionally, downtime from taking systems offline to move to the new production environment will be reduced by 66 percent and will require less than a day. The new automated data transformation tool will enable customers to easily move to new operating systems and database platforms as part of the upgrade process, providing them greater flexibility to move between system environments.

"Historically, enterprise application upgrades have often cost 30 percent or more of the original implementation," said Barry Wilderman, senior vice president, META Group, Inc. "By introducing specialized programs to manage the upgrade process, vendors like PeopleSoft are addressing the total cost of upgrades issue head on."

"We wanted to enjoy the benefits of the latest release of PeopleSoft Human Capital Management before our critical benefits enrollment period," said David Sikora, project manager, Vicor Corporation. "With the new Accelerated Upgrade process and tools from PeopleSoft, we can make these upgrades quickly with minimal cost."

Interactive Service Repository Eases Business Process Integration

One of the top IT challenges today is maintaining and updating integration points to reflect business process requirements and changes. PeopleSoft's new Interactive Service Repository hosts content for more than 1,500 application integration points for PeopleSoft and third-party partner applications. The new repository enables customers to view business process integration points across multiple applications. This eliminates the time and resources previously needed to translate and update individual application integration points to address changing business process requirements.

Building on a Strong Track Record

PeopleSoft has shipped seven new product releases with significant Total Ownership Experience functionality since the initiative was launched in May 2003. These technologies have reduced implementation time by 20 percent, increased user productivity on key tasks by 30 percent, driven down steps to apply updates and maintenance by 80 percent, and reduced time to resolve support incidents by 44 percent.

Crimson Consulting Group Study on the Application Ownership Experience

In a separate news release today, Crimson Consulting Group, an independent consulting firm, announced the findings of a research study that demonstrate PeopleSoft's continued leadership in offering a superior application ownership experience. PeopleSoft received higher marks than SAP and Oracle in the areas of implementation, usability, and maintenance. Crimson noted the following:

--Implementation: PeopleSoft implementation features rated higher than Microsoft, SAP, and Siebel in enabling implementation teams to install, implement, and deploy enterprise applications on time and under budget.