JD Edwards' Customers Are Happy With PeopleSoft

PeopleSoft can enter the new year knowing that its newly acquired customer base is happy with its new applications provider. The PeopleSoft/JD Edwards deal was announced six months ago; a new IDC survey reports that more than 80 percent of former JD Edwards customers either have a more favorable view of PeopleSoft as a software vendor to do business with, or they have not changed their perception of the vendor. According to IDC, this suggests that the merger plan from PeopleSoft has been well received. In fact, only 9 percent of respondents said they have a less favorable view of the vendor. "Survey results indicated that there are as many reasons for PeopleSoft to celebrate as there were concerns after the purchase of JD Edwards,'' says Albert Pang, director of enterprise applications research at IDC, and author of the report. "In general, the former JD Edwards customers that were surveyed are positive about the integration plans. But this positive sentiment is being challenged by their unwillingness to invest in more PeopleSoft products in 2004 when it comes to enterprise applications upgrade or replacement activities." From a CRM perspective Pang says that PeopleSoft could potentially lose some customers to competitors. "PeopleSoft needs to declare how it is going to fix the mess posed by two opposing CRM strategies," he says. "Otherwise, the CRM teams from SAP and Siebel will be gaining shares at the expense of PeopleSoft. PeopleSoft indicated the new CRM strategy for PeopleSoft Enterprise One will be directed at asset-intensive industries, whereas the CRM product from PeopleSoft Enterprise, through the Vantive applications it acquired earlier, will be geared toward services, healthcare, higher education, and public-sector industries." PeopleSoft, on the other hand, says the two platforms are an asset. "The fact that we have two platforms is a significant competitive advantage from our perspective," says Steve Roop, vice president of marketing for PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM. "There is no single CRM solution that is a perfect fit for every industry," he says explaining that the EnterpriseOne (former JD Edwards) solution is built for manufacturing, while the Enterprise CRM suite is designed for the financial services, media, telecommunications, and education industries, or those less dependent on supply chain-management functionality. "Basically it amounts to having two solutions that out of the box better meet the unique needs of those industries by themselves than Siebel or SAP," Roop says. The IDC survey reveals that 69 percent of respondents are not planning to invest significantly more on PeopleSoft applications in the next six months compared with the days when they were JD Edwards customers. This suggests that PeopleSoft will need to demonstrate dramatic value or ROI of its products before it can win them over, according to Pang. Among the top applications priorities for former JD Edwards customers in 2004 are greater applications usage, competitive advantage through integration, and consolidation of ERP systems, which tied with the reduction of custom coding as the number-three priority.

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