Peoplesoft to boost NZ staffing

By ADAM GIFFORD

Peoplesoft's New Zealand operation is taking on more staff in preparation for the launch here of its internet-enabled software, Peoplesoft 8.

New Zealand manager Stewart Gibbs, who recently moved over from rival JD Edwards, said Peoplesoft was relaunching itself worldwide under a new management team after a few tough years.

The company had decided to go back to its grassroots.

"It's taking ownership of its implementations and becoming more of a solutions-based organisation rather than believing it is a software-based organisation," Mr Gibbs said.

He was looking to increase the 20 staff with more account managers, project managers and senior consultants.

While Peoplesoft would take more prime responsibility for implementations, it would continue to work with partners, who in this country included four of the top five business services firms and a couple of smaller consultancies, he said.

Analysts saw Peoplesoft's reduction of sales support staff as one of the reasons for its poor performance last year, when it lost $US177.8 million ($395 million).

It has been back in the black for the past two quarters, and just reported $US15.9 million net income on revenue of $US374.5 million, up 45 per cent on the first quarter.

In the Asia-Pacific area, licence revenue rose 40 per cent in the second quarter compared with last year, service revenue rose 19 per cent and total earnings 26 per cent.

Mr Gibbs said the fundamental difference with Peoplesoft 8 was the lack of a client PC - it is totally browser-based.

"The technology infrastructure doesn't need to have the high bandwidth it previously did. It also means you can deploy the technology out to your customers, your suppliers and employees who are not necessarily in-house, over a very thin infrastructure using dialup lines or intranet connectivity."

AMR Research last week compared Peoplesoft 8 and Oracle 11i applications, both marketed as "100 per cent internet."

It said Oracle and PeopleSoft were far ahead of competitors in providing true internet applications.

"The other major enterprise application vendors are still wrapping their Windows clients inside of web browsers or providing limited HTML-based access."

AMR said Peoplesoft came off best in a head-to-head comparison.

"Perhaps if Oracle is 100 per cent internet, Peoplesoft should be advertising 110 per cent."

While Peoplesoft's traditional strength is in human resource management systems, it has also developed an e-commerce solution in partnership with Commerce One and is offering CRM (customer relationship management) through subsidiary Vantive.

Vantive sales here are handled by Sales Technology, and Mr Gibbs said there were no plans to change this.

He said the local market had been quiet because of the post-Y2K slowdown, the change of Government and the fact that most firms ran a July to June financial year.

This would not be the boomer year people were predicting.