Staff reshuffle at Peoplesoft

By ADAM GIFFORD

Peoplesoft's New Zealand manager, Frank Anderson, has organised himself out of a job, handing over the reins to former JD Edwards' professional services manager Stewart Gibbs.

Mr Anderson, an industry veteran with a resume which includes Wang, Storagetek and Electronic Data Systems, says the move was not a sign of any lack of confidence in Peoplesoft or himself. It was more about the changes affecting the market for enterprise resource planning software.

The departure of the customer services director and the sole sales person created an opportunity to reshuffle the 20 local positions.

"We now have sales people in Auckland and Wellington, adding more horsepower to the mix.

"The size of the market is not such that you can have two full-time sales people plus account managers and technical support, plus me."

Mr Anderson says while his own background is in sales and management, Mr Gibbs has considerable customer and professional services experience.

"We're doing a lot more customer service. Customers want us to take a more prominent part in implementations, so we are providing up to 20 per cent of implementation teams."

That is a change from the past, when Peoplesoft sold licences for its software and handed the job of implementation to a partner, coming back in with an account manager to look after the customer once the software was installed.

He says a significant part of Peoplesoft's revenue will come from sales of Vantive customer relationship management software, which Peoplesoft bought last year.

"The distributors here, Sales Tech, are probably the top distributors worldwide, so we're keeping them on."

Peoplesoft is bidding for several contracts for its financial and human resources applications.

"These were deals which were talked about, but deferred through 1999 and are now rearing their heads."

He is considering his options and intends to renew his pilot's licence and trim his golf handicap.

Mr Gibbs says the chance to combine sales and consulting roles was one of the attractions of the job.

Customers now see software like Peoplesoft as part of a wider solution, "and it's important to be able to market and sell the fully-integrated product."

Before his three-year stint at JD Edwards, Mr Gibbs worked for 12 years for Atex, which makes software for the newspaper industry.

While he concedes Peoplesoft has yet to achieve critical mass in New Zealand, the company is committed to the whole Asia-Pacific market.

"The New Zealand market is fairly soft at the moment. We've had a frustrating year with Y2K but there are a lot of potential opportunities on the table. Our task is to make sure we get out and get some of them."

For the first quarter of 2000 PeopleSoft had $US375.4 million in revenues. Its income of $US11 million was 39 per cent up on last year, when the company earned $US7.9 million on revenue of $US350.1 million.

Licence fees accounted for $US90.2 million, with the company selling a lot of its applications to companies doing e-business development.

Services revenue rose 4 per cent to $US262.1 million.