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GCN Home > 03/07/05 issue

The great PeopleSoft migration

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

What should agencies be thinking as they consider life after PeopleSoft? Move to Oracle, or jump ship?

If all goes according to schedule, the Defense Department will complete the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System—estimated to be the world’s largest human resources program—in 2013. Unfortunately, 2013 is also the year DIMHRS will become a legacy system, because that’s the year Oracle Corp. plans to end support for PeopleSoft applications, the platform DIMHRS will run on.

Last December, when database vendor Oracle purchased PeopleSoft Inc., agency heads faced a tough decision. Should they stick with Oracle as the company migrated PeopleSoft users over to its own e-business platform? Or would the upgrade be so arduous, the new features so underwhelming, that making the switch would be untenable?

While Oracle has pledged to support PeopleSoft users in the short term, government IT managers are at a crossroads. Not surprisingly, other enterprise resource planning software vendors, such as Lawson Software Inc., Microsoft Corp., SAP AG and SSA Global Technologies Inc., smell an opportunity and have quickly started offering incentives to agencies in hopes of luring them to their platforms.

Whether agencies stick with PeopleSoft/Oracle or jump ship (see sidebar for one of each), there is considerable work to do. Tony DeSomma, managing director with the Oracle public sector practice of solutions integrator BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Va., said the jump from PeopleSoft to Oracle would be “more than an upgrade. It will almost be a new platform.”

Making a CIO’s job even tougher is the fact that Oracle has not yet divulged any specifics about the architecture of its PeopleSoft replacement platform, code-named Fusion. Oracle developers are now working with PeopleSoft engineers to find a way to get the best PeopleSoft features into the new software, according to Michael Sperling, an Oracle spokesman. Yet such details are essential to determining whether Oracle’s new direction will be in synch with agencies’ own enterprise architectures.

In January, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison proffered a timeline of how the company would replace PeopleSoft with Fusion. Ellison said at least one new version of PeopleSoft, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, will be released in 2006. Components of Fusion will be introduced in 2007, and the merged product should be completely rolled out by 2013, when Oracle ceases supporting PeopleSoft applications.

More news on related topics: Acquisition / Contracts, Content / Record Management, Defense IT, Enterprise Architecture, New Products / Technology, Outsourcing, IT Management, Procurement



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