When using PeopleCode and Java mixed together, one thing that will cause problems for you is the inability to do any casting of Java objects from the PeopleCode side. For example, if you were storing some Java objects in a HashMap.

Local JavaObject &map = CreateJavaObject("java.util.HashMap");
Local JavaObject &int = CreateJavaObject("java.lang.Integer", 28);
&map.put("TEST", &int);

Later on, when you want to get the object back out and use it for something

Local JavaObject &int2 = &map.get("TEST");
Warning(&int2.intValue());

You'll get an error "Java method intValue not found for class java.lang.Object.".

This is because the PeopleCode runtime is using the return type for the "get" method on the HashMap object to decide what object it has. Fair enough, that's how Java works as well. If you're writing Java, you'd do something like this.

Integer int2 = (Integer)map.get("TEST");

The (Integer) part changes (or casts) the returned value of the get method from java.lang.Object to Integer. Unfortunately, there is no way to do this in PeopleCode, so you'd have to write (and distribute to the application servers) some Java glue code that could handle the casting, but that's a bit of a headache.

We've shown in previous blog entries how to use Java reflection from PeopleCode to work around this, but Java 5 brings a new option for us to try. PeopleTools 8.49 (the current version of PeopleTools as of the moment) is the first version of PeopleTools to use Java 5.

As a side note, Java 1.4 end of life is October 30, 2008, so those of you looking for a good reason to justify a PeopleTools upgrade to your management, here it is :-)

So what helps us in Java 5 with casting? There is a new method in java.lang.Class called cast, which according to the doc, "Casts an object to the class or interface represented by this Class object.".

Great!

So we update the code

Local JavaObject &int2 = &map.get("TEST");
Local JavaObject &int3 = &int.getClass().cast(&int2);
Warning(&int3.intValue());

PeopleCode knows that the &int object is of type java.lang.Integer so we can get it's Class object and use that to cast our object that came back out of the HashMap and we'll be all set, right?

Nope. Same error as before. "Java method intValue not found for class java.lang.Object.".

Labels: 2008, Java, PeopleCode

Here's a quick quiz for you PeopleCode experts out there. Which of these lines of code will Application Designer accept (and run) and which ones will it not?

&! = "Am I valid?";
&@ = "Am I valid?";
&# = "Am I valid?";
&$ = "Am I valid?";
&% = "Am I valid?";
&^ = "Am I valid?";
&& = "Am I valid?";
&* = "Am I valid?";
&( = "Am I valid?";
&) = "Am I valid?";
&_ = "Am I valid?";
&- = "Am I valid?";

Here are the valid lines

&@ = "Am I valid?";
&# = "Am I valid?";
&$ = "Am I valid?";
&_ = "Am I valid?";

and here are the invalid lines

&! = "Am I valid?";
&% = "Am I valid?";
&^ = "Am I valid?";
&& = "Am I valid?";
&* = "Am I valid?";
&( = "Am I valid?";
&) = "Am I valid?";
&- = "Am I valid?";

Of course, this is more just interesting trivia as opposed to something that we would recommend doing.

Labels: 2008, PeopleCode

Jim Marion has a good writeup on his blog with some ideas for customizing the PeopleSoft signout page, but it doesn't directly cover a common use case that I get asked about a lot, which is redirecting the user somewhere else at signout time.

A common reason for doing that is if you have a primary portal, such as the Oracle Portal, that provides access into your PeopleSoft applications. When the PeopleSoft session is done, you want the user to return to the main portal home page. Another reason is that you have some sort of single signon external to PeopleSoft, so you don't want the PeopleSoft users to see the PeopleSoft signon page.

How to do it

The process for doing this is pretty straightforward. The HTML that gets displayed at signout time is defined in the "Look and Feel" page of the Web Profile. One common source of confusion with the values defined on this page is that they are not URLs, but they are references to files in the web server. So you can't set a different URL here, you need to have the redirection logic in the appropriate file on the web server.

By default, the file that gets displayed at signout time is called signin.html. We'll want to make a copy of this since by default it gets used for the signon page as well as the signout page. You can give it a name like signout_redirect.html ; end users will never see this name though so just name it so that you remember it's purpose later. Whatever name that you call it, you'll want to reference that name for the logout page in your Web Profile.

For example, if you wanted to send your users to the Grey Sparling home page with a 0 second delay when they log out from PeopleSoft, you would add the following line immediately after the <HEAD> tag at the top of your new file.

<meta equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.greysparling.com/">

The contents of these files are read into memory when the web server starts up, so you'll need to bounce the web server in order to get that to take effect.

Preventing Page Flash at Signout Time

What I've outlined above is the simplest way to solve the problem. One small usability issue exists though. In spite of the fact that we have specified 0 seconds for the delay, the browser will still render all of the HTML onscreen before sending the user to the new home page. The best course of action here is to remove everything between the <BODY> tags. That saves the browser from having to render the page so it can get to the redirect quicker. There is still a quick page flash, but it is quicker and it is just a blank screen so it doesn't look quite as bad.

The HTTP gurus in the crowd are probably wondering why this isn't solved with an HTTP level redirect, which would make the whole page flash issue go away. The answer is that you don't have easy access to do this. You can use some of the options that Jim mentions in his blog (we do something similar in our ERP Firewall for PeopleSoft product) if it is really a big deal to you though.

Upgrade Issues

Each time you install PIA (whether from an upgrade or just adding a new web server) you'll need to copy this newly created file from an existing web server (since you no longer care about what new features/layout changes that Oracle might add to these pages in new releases).

If you install a lot of web server instances, you can put this file in the setup program so that you always end up with your custom one instead of the default. Just search for the file PTSitePsftdocs.jar in your PSHOME\setup directory. That has the source files that get put into the web server.

Session Expiration

Thankfully there is a separate page that gets displayed when a session expires vs someone signing out. That file is called expire.html. You may want to setup some separate handling for this one so that the user does see a message about their session having timed out instead of just being redirected to a different page.

Where are the files?

The actual files to edit in the web server are stored in WEB-INF\psftdocs\<sitename>. I'd list the whole path, but it's so incredibly deeply nested that you'd need a special wide monitor for the browser to be able to scroll that far :-) That's a subject for another blog post some day though.

Can I change signout behaviour based on the user?

By the time the signout page is displayed, the user's session has already been wiped out. You no longer even know who the user is/was. There are no PeopleCode events that run at signout time by default (although it can be done).

Read Jim's blog post or talk to us about ideas for getting around this.

Any other tips?

If you want to change the label/text of the Signout link, it is defined in the Message Catalog. The message set number is 95, and the message id is 408. Don't forget to update any other languages that you may be using with your PeopleSoft applications.

Labels: 2008, Security, Sysadmin

Last thursday, I presented at the Philadelphia PeopleSoft and JD Edwards RUG. I was able to meet with lots of PeopleSoft customers and even catch up with a few folks I hadn't seen since the 2006 FSIUG meeting in Manhattan.

I even had a chance to spend some time with Kevin Agatone, fellow nVisionary, PeopleSoft Projects developer, and Fusion Projects developer. Kevin used to work for me on the reporting development team and ended moving on to bigger and better things.

I ended up creating new versions of our award-winning Advanced Tips and Techniques sessions, and the slide where I discussed PeopleSoft's control surfaces was very well received. I think I see a future blog intry coming.

Here are the links to the powerpoints

• More Advanced PeopleTools Tips and Techniques
• More Advanced Reporting Tips and Techniques
• Noetix Views for PeopleSoft HRMS (I covered hoverboards in this topic).

We look forward to our next user group meeting: Quest Northeast. Hope to see you there.

Labels: 2008, Events

This came as a comment from the following posting, and I felt that it deserved its own blog entry.

The exact question is as follows:

What would be the best approach to share reports between two PeopleSoft environments, considering we use drill down extensively?

Background

This is an extremely good question, and it brings back memories of some of the discussions we had when updating the report repository in PeopleTools 8.40. Therefore, it makes sense to talk a bit about the history of the report repository as a starting point.

Prior to PeopleTools 8.0

Prior to PeopleTools 8.0, the report repository did not exist. Customers would run reports either locally using the client/server tools (PSQED.EXE, PSNVS.EXE, PSSQR.EXE, CRW32.EXE), or on the process scheduler server. The reports would either be viewed with online viewers (when using the client/server tools), or saved in the file system accessible to the process scheduler server. Users would then access the files using network shares (and secured using network security).

PeopleTools 8.13

PeopleTools 8.13 represents the first release where we had a report repository and report manager. At the time, it was architected to work with only one system, and would not actually authenticate the user accessing a report (it would create an RBAN that was impossible to guess as the identifier of the report --- for those geeks out there, RBAN stands for Really Big Alpha-Numeric). Other limitations include a lack of using folders to categorize reports in the user interface.

PeopleTools 8.40

One of the main projects in PeopleTools 8.40 was to extend report manager to address some of its limitations. One of the primary use cases was to make it easier for users of nVision to utilize it. Here is a snopsis of some of the features that went into that release

• Folders, so that reports could have some level of categorization.
• Support for cross-system report lists
• Improved security over accessing reports (thus eliminating the imfamous RBAN).

The designs for this release pulled together all the requirements into one solution. Because foldering and cross-system access required additional data and infrastructure, it was decided to leverage integration broker for both (and the PSRF application messages were born). The report manager pages were reorganized, including two additional pages added to report manager that utilize the information published and subscribed by these new messages.

• The List tab is a standard search page against cross-system data and the first level of foldering.
• The Explorer tab is a tree view over the foldering metadata attached to the reports.
• Finally, the old report manager page was renamed to "Administration", so that you could access reports on the local system, even if integration broker wasn't working in your environment.

About Deployment Strategies

Okay, now that we have some of the background covered, let's go into a little more detail about how the cross-system report access was intended to work (because we leverage the same concepts in our Report Explorer product).

Notification versus Ownership

The key to understanding deployment options is to understand that conceptually we are separating report notification from report ownership. In other words, the system that generated a report is always owned by that report. Ownership means that the system continues to secure and grant access to the report, and any actions taken when viewing that report are specific to the system that generated the report (more on this later). This also means that any means of aggregating the list of reports and/ore notifying end-users of those reports (with links back) is just that: a list of reports with links to access them in place.

For a product like nVision, where you need to drill, the information needed to do the drilling is embedded directly in the report from the system running the nVision report. There's actually PeopleCode that embeds this information as a parameter on the command line. This means that regardless of how you open the nVision report, it will go back to the system that ran the report to perform the drill (which is exactly what you would want it to do). This works the same way if you use one of the drilling techniques discussed in the following blog entry. Because the local system is running and managing the report, you don't have to worry about it if you use the PSRF integration broker messages as a means of pulling it together. Even if you physically move the reports to a new location, the metadata needed to drill contains the URL to access the system it was generated from (but if you delete the report from the report repository after you move it, you will prevent the drilling from occurring because the process scheduler won't be able to find it).

So, the simple answer is that because the system that ran the report also puts in the additional drilling metadata (including the URLs to access the system), drilling will continue to work even if you copy or aggregate the links to access the reports elsewhere.

Labels: Drilling, Report_Manager

In honor of Oracle finally completing the BEA acquisition, I asked one of my old bosses, Peter Gassner, to write a guest post on some of BEA memories.

Peter actually came to PeopleSoft to fix up the old 2 tier client/server architecture and BEA played a big role in that. But I'll let Peter tell the story.

---------

Oracle finally owns TUXEDO. You can read it here. Sure, it does not mention TUXEDO, but it is in there, and it started it all.

The TUXEDO middleware product played a big part in PeopleSoft's technical history, starting from the release of PeopleSoft 7 in 1997. It is kind of interesting to trace the history of TUXEDO as it passed on from company to company and became involved with PeopleTools.

It started inside AT&T in the early 1983 and found it's way to Novell in 1993 (by way of Unix System Laboratories). It was there in early 1996 that PeopleSoft and TUXEDO met. I still remember the very small conference room (no windows) in New Jersey where Baer Tierkel, Rick Bergquist and I met with some of the core inventors of TUXEDO, including Mark Carges and Randy McBlane. We liked the software and the people. We liked it better than Tibco, MQseries, or the various other things we saw. We really did not feel like building middleware ourselves (very hard work!), so we thought OEMing TUXEDO would be good.

But, before we could complete an OEM deal, TUXEDO was snapped up again, by a tiny company that was just forming called "BEA", which stood for Bill, Ed, and Alfred. What was this BEA, we thought? Rick, Baer and I met with Bill, Ed, and Alfred, and decided "still good people, still good software, lets go ahead". That became a great partnership for BEA and PeopleSoft. It made PeopleTools more robust, and it had some not small hand in the OEM success that BEA had with TUXEDO and later with Weblogic.

Over the years BEA grow. BEA acquired WebLogic in 1998 and PeopleSoft OEMed that as well. I still remember talking to Alfred over lunch one day in 1998 after the weblogic purchase. He made a small comment that I always remember. He said with a very straight face: "That weblogic stuff is just flying off the shelves." I probably should have bought some BEA stock at that point:-) TUXEDO meanwhile was alive and ticking inside PeopleTools. Sure, it was all wrapped up in "psadmin" so that the quite unsightly configuration files were not seen, but it was there.

And now, TUXEDO finally comes home to roost in the great enterprise software roosting ground, Oracle

Congratulations, TUXEDO old boy, you have done well.


Peter Gassner
CEO
Verticals onDemand
PeopleTools Alumni (1995-2003)

Labels: 2008, History

We've been remiss in updating our customers page. We would like to welcome the following organizations to the Grey Sparling family:

• U.S. Department of State
• Cherokee Nations Enterprises
• PMI Insurance
• Fleming College
• Rapp Collins Worldwide
• The Marketing Store
• Methanex Corporation

Labels: Business

Presented by: Doris Wong, General Manager for PeopleSoft Enterprise

This was Doris's keynote, and it did a great job of showing to PeopleSoft customers reasons to upgrade to current releases, and demonstrating the vision and continued investment in PeopleSoft products.

Prior to the Session

Prior to the session, Doris recognized me in the audience, so I decided to walk up and say "Hi" to her. We talked a bit about non-PeopleSoft stuff (our kids went to preschool together, so it was good to catch up). She also wanted to know how things were going business-wise, and made sure to mention that she's been hearing good things about us from PeopleSoft customers (which is much better than her hearing bad things about us from PeopleSoft customers -- "I'm watching you, Wazowski. Always watching. Always").

Agenda

• 2008 IT Strategic Initiaives
• Oracle applicagtions strategy
• Delivering on PeopleSoft
  PeopleSoft Investment Strategy
• Key Takeaways

2008 IT Strategic Initiatives

Forrester survey where organizations found critical priority of the following areas

• 72% want improvement of integration between apps
• 59% want upgrade packaged applications
• 47% shift from functional to process orientation

Oracle's applications strategy follows this:

• Applications unlimited
• Application Integration Archietecture
• Fusion Applications

Applications unlimited -> we will continue to invest. This is strategic for us.

Second part is applications integration architecture. Designed around creating a common platform for easy integration of our systems Provides framework to easily orchistrate business processes across a heterogeneous environment.

Fusion - this continues to be a path, although optionsal. Our customers can look at this and determine what's best for their business.

Supporting all 3 parts of the strategy is Oracle Fusion Middleware. We will be standardizing on the middleware.

Doris, then showed a diagram that illustrates how fusion middleware can be used as part of a larger enterprise applications infrastructure. It started by showing different backend systems linked by fusion middleware transport. In the middle are common objects and definitions of those objects. At the top, it shows oracle's business process orchestration.

Doris, then went more into how Oracle's Application Integration Arcitecture (AIA) plays an important part. She started by showing different layers of the architecture.

• foundation is service management
• then revenue management
• then customer management
• then enterprise management
• finally, she showed processes that span the different layers.

Delivering on PeopleSoft

Doris, then moved into more details with respect to PeopleSoft. She started by illustrating the importance of the PeopleSoft Enterprise suite to Oracle's overall business strategy:

• 9 of top 10 commercial banks are ps customers
• 59% of top 100 of fortune 500 companies own ps
• retail - the 5 biggest use ps
• 6 of top 10 communications companies use PeopleSoft
• 60% of the top 15 insurance companies use PeopleSoft
• 70% of top 10 health care organizations use PeopleSoft
• 19 us states use PeopleSoft
• 50 of largest counties and cities use PeopleSoft
• 7 of top 10 research universities use PeopleSoft
• 8 of top 10 printing and publishing companies use PeopleSoft

PeopleSoft beates best in class. Aberdeen group survey PeopleSoft customers are not average when it comes to hcm.

• PS customers are 41% more likely than industry a verage to be satisfied
• PS customers outperform industry average in every kpi used to measure b est in class
• PS cusotmers demonstrate higher org perfomance improvement versus industry average
• PS customers leverage automated hcm tools to achieve better ROI on their software investments

PeopleSoft 9.0 themes:

Doris, then went on to talk a bit about the PeopleSoft roadmap, starting with PeopleSoft 9 (which is currently shipping):

• Extended value through technology
• best in class business processes
• a superior ownership experience

Doris, moved from the themes to talk more about the content in the release from a challenge, capability, and value perspective (which does a great job of laying out the return on investment in upgrading).

Challenges	Capabilities	Value
Heterogeneous IT environment	SOA and oracle fusion middleware, bpel process manager	Lower IT costs
Integration	Eliminate costly interfaces in cross-applicagtion business processess
Tightening/Changing Labor market	Integrated talent mangement	Attract, Engage, and Retain Ralent
Contextual Information	Transactional Dashboards	Insight-driven Business Processes
Address regulatory requirements and performance needs	Business process enhancemsnts to address OFAC, SARBOX, and more	Achieve sustainable compliance and high perfomance
Complex and changing reporting requirements	Oracle XML Publisher	Reduce reporting costs
Managing Applications Portfolio	Lifecycle Management Tools	Lower TCO
Accelerate User Adoption	Improved UE	Reduce training burden
Focusing on strategic activities	Employee self service	Improve efficiency and productivity

Doris revisited the previous table to discuss specifics of release content

Integrated talent management

• Single, enterprise wide system. proflie management, business intelligence with single source of truth.
• improved usability for employees and managers
• relevant role based activites and content
• single user experience
• line of sight visibility

Business Insight

• supplier relationship management dashboard
• Expanded KPIs for buyers and managers
• Summary metrics at business unit level
• Supplier performance analtics pagelet

Business Processes --> contract management

• SRM dashboard example.
• Shows different metrics (aggregated view of source-to-pay) business processs for buysers and managers.
• Shows dashboard, but doesn't show the actual transactions (other than lists)

Compliance and performance

• Enforcer has extended reporting including 345 reports that facilitate financial statement certification.
• Improved tracking of training hours, costs, etc for compliance
• Supply chain - auto-validation of customers and vendors against SDN list via web services for compliance with patriot acts OFAC regulations
• expanded supports for IFRS 15 evaluation requirements

Reporting

• Shows the XML publisher architecture: extract data xml publisher publishing engine formates the data using templates and then file formats.
• Showed difference between SQR report and new XML report with template availabile starting in 8.48 of tools.

Livecycle management tools

• integration with enterprise manager - enables it admin to graphicallly manager and manage Release 90 systems from same console as other oracle databases, middleware and apps

Improved SOA Support

• New UI and increased standards support
• Stronger integration with BPEL process manager

Enhanced patching and maintenance

• streamlined patching through tools that understand impact.

Why upgrade?

Business buenefits of enhancements

• Get business value of all releases
• Eliminate customations and niche vendors
• Improve efficiency and prodicvivity
• reduce costs

Available services and tools

• Upgrade aids in peopletools
• Oracle solution center upgrade lab
• Oracle consulting upgrade services

Planning Options

• Separate tools and app upgrades
• Future upgrade processes to fusion apps

Upgrade steps:

• Added a new upgrade process from hcm 8.3 that does the 2-step process in a single set of steps (8.3 t0o 9.0 wrapper).

PeopleSoft Investment Strategy

Objectives:

• Solution Value
• Innovation
• Customer success

Drivers

• Corporate strategy
• Market conditions
• Competitive landscape

More on 9.1 Strategy:

• Ensure market leadership in HCM, key industries and global markets
• Provide high value low risk releases
• Customer-driven enhancements
• Avoid creating complex upgrades
• Deliver integration and innovation
• Leverage oracles portfolio of applications
• Adopt oracle fusion middleware capabilities
• Enhance ownership experience
• Increaed usabilith and streamlined processes
• Maintain peopletools backwards compatibility

9.1 roadmap. The rollout is planned in 2009.

Summary

I was impressed with how comprehensive the update was. Doris and team have been very busy, and have spent a lot of time listening to PeopleSoft customers.

Labels: 2008, Collaborate

This session is intended to discuss OBIEE as it relates to financial services. It was nice to see as much demo-ing as they did. It was also nice to see more of the features of OBIEE highlighted, especially the ability to create a very useful semantic view of the data that users can understand.

Room was full. About 200-300 people. Standing room only.

Dan Blankenship on FSI user group board - was also in pervious session. He introduced Steve Burns, who is on the Financial Services team at Oracle.

Session started by querying the audience. Most of attendees raised hands when asked if used PeopleSoft for back-office. Only a couple who used eBusiness suite.

OBIEE plus.
The session began by introducing OBIEE plus as the technology platform for providing anlaytics in this area. Steve started by talking about semantic model in OBIEE. Put logic into semantic layer.

Listed Golman, Wachovia, Axa as organizations using OBIEE. Leverage investments you've made in data source.

Talked about strategy of bringing together hyperion, peoplesoft and other acquisitions. (Operational BI, Enterprise perormance management, transaction systems). With the addition of the ability to access Essbase content within an OBIEE meta-model, this tool is now able to bring all this together for a single, cohesive solution that encompasses the different back-office systems.

Solutions Space
Steve, then went on to cover more about how they think about financial services from an analytic application perspective. Financial services organized into 4 areas: profitability, performance, risk management, and compliance. Below are some of the notes that I captured for a few of these areas:

Profitability
Used Fidelity as an example company that looks at customer profitability.

Showed screenshots with lots of charts and supporting details. Very analytic focused gtoing from high level to lower levels.

Credit suisse was listed as customer of OBIEE as well.

Risk management
Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Bear Stearns listed as users of compliance solutions.

Features and Functions
They quickly went into a demonstration of a few of the areas and how the content that they're putting into OBIEE can solve many of these business poroblems.

Pervasive information delivery

• interactive dashboards
  
• ad-hoc query
  
• detections and alerts
  
• production reporting
  

Pervasive delivery

• financial reporting
  
• office
  
• disconnect and mobile anlaytics
  
• desktop gadgets
  

They also made a lot about the ability to drill from a report or analysis back into the transaction system. This feature is very similar to what we've blogged about for PeopleSoft reporting tools. I wonder if they've thought about taking this to the next level (like hoverboards)?

They moved on to demo drilling from report into more detail (starting from dashboard). Because they've pre-defined the path, they call this guided navigation.

They moved on to show how a user could start with a dashboard, extend a report, and add it to a personal dashboard. They didn't cover the administrative aspects of people creating their own dasboards, but it was cool seeing them do it. The functional area demonstrated was payables, where they started with 2 gauges and then drilled from one of them into a report.

The continued by demoing modifying the report (adding a chart). They then showed creating a new report and adding it to a dashboard. Positioned that business users can do this (do not need to get IT involved).

Summary
This was one of the better OBIEE presentations I've seen. One area I'd like to see more is a comprehensive story about how people will be able to snap these new applications onto their existing ERP solutions. This may not make sense in this presentations, but I believe that one of the primary factors in making a purchasing decision for OBIEE versus the products sold by other BI vendors is the effort to get it up and running (and really demonstrating to folks how these new applications are going to provide a seamless integration with their existing solutions... right now, I see a lot of hand-waving going on instead of showing exactly how this will work across data models of different releases of Siebel, PeopleSoft, and e-Business suite).

Labels: 2008, Collaborate, Events

Presented by: Eric Dickmann, Financial Services

Because so many of our customers are part of the Financial Services SIG, I wanted to make sure I attended this session to see what was going on here (especially since last year Amira Morcos had mentioned that there would be a business unit and general manager for this practice).

Eric is the new General Manager of the financial services IBU (discussed in this blog entry)

It was interesting to see the difference between approaches of PeopleSoft and Oracle to the Financial Services industry. Eric went through his solutions map for all 3 areas in financial services: Banking, Insurance, and Capital Markets. Where PeopleSoft focused primarily on the analytics and back-office solutions, Oracle will approach the market across all aspects of the industry including the front-office and point of sale systems (which is something PeopleSoft didn't address).

General Strategy
He described the goals of the financial institution within the following categories:

• Customer intimacy


• Competitive differentiation


• Cost effectiveness


• Compliance to regulation and risk mitigagion


• Service and speed are differentiation in industry.

He descripbed the execution strategy of his group as follows:

• Process driven


• Pre-built


• Ineroperable


• Flexible

Oracle's approach will be to assemble existing assets. Also to provide mulitiple deployment options for customers that include hosting, packaged products, or tools and custom applicagtions.

These solutions will cover all the way from front office to back office. Showed the product footprint for different areas - solution maps. These are available at http://www.oracle.com/industries/financial_services/index.html .

Product
From a product perspective, the solution will cover the following main areas

• pre-built integrations for a ccount origination


• Governance, risk, and compliance for financial services


• advisor desktop


• claims management


• profitability and asset/liability management analytics (new products)


• flexcube with oracle identity managmeent

Compliance
On the Compliance side, the solution will include GRC for banking, insurance, capital markets, covering

• sox


• mifid, regnms


• operational risk


• compliance risk


• basel 2 and 1a, solvency 2


• aml, kyc, fraud prevention

Role of Siebel
Siebel looks to be a very important part of the financial services strategy:

• Siebel will cover a good amount of the back-end systems, such as Siebel CRM as bck-end for account origination (this will integrate with i-flex's flexcube for identity management).


• Siebel CRM on demand for advisor desktop. first pre-built hosted crm solutions for wealth management. web services. shows user interface and analytics.


• Enterprise claims management solution - partof siebel 8. claims management, context management, financial hub, back office.

For dashboards, Eric showed a few dashboards related to SOX and gauges of status of controls. powered by the OBIEE framework. He did not discuss where data is coming from and said that this is new. This means that PeopleSoft's solutions in this space is not going to be part of this solutions map.

Profitability - this is where PeopleSoft was strong. Instead of using PeopleSoft EPM, Risk Weighted Capital, and Funds Transfer Pricing, Oracle will be using OFSA and OBIEE as the solution for this.

Questions:

Question	Answer
Can you talk more about what's going on with PeopleSfot financial servces side?	If you're a PeopleSoft customer, you will continue to be supported by applications unlimited. HCM will continue to be a focus area for PeopleSoft.
I'm another PeopleSoft Customer. Can you tell me more about what I can expect as a PeopleSoft customer about Fusion?	Everything you saw in this presentation is based on Fusion.

What I saw missing
I didn't see any mention of PeopleSoft EPM or the financial services analytic applications that were hosted on the EPM warehouse. I also didn't see any recognition of role of PeopleSoft GL in financial services organizations who are part of this Industry Group. By reading between the lines, it looks like the development team at Oracle isn't going to be focused on these areas, even though the the vast majority of attendees (>80%) categorized themselves as PeopleSoft customers.

Summary
It will be interesting to see how this strategy plays out. The Oracle solutions map is definitely much envcompassing than PeopleSoft's, especially in the banking and CRM areas. This could be a good opportunity for them. With respect to corporate performance management, compliance, and analytics, I think that Oracle will have a challenging time getting traction with much of the members of the industry group until they come up with a better story for organizations using PeopleSoft Financials and EPM. From an engineering perspective, I believe packaging analytics in OBIEE that are targeted specifically to EPM (funds transfer pricing, risk weighted capital, etc), as well as PoepleSoft Financials will allow them to extend existing solutions with new products and features versus leaving it up to the customer to figure out how to accomplish this themselves.

Labels: 2008, Collaborate