Paco Aubrejuan, General Manager of PeopleSoft within Oracle, gave a session this afternoon introducing the new PeopleSoft 9.1 applications.

Before getting into the content, I have to congratulate Paco on doing multiple live demos during his session. I see way too many people these days relying on Flash demos instead of showing things. Yes, that guarantees that your demo won't crash, but it also makes it much more likely that the audience will be asleep before your presentation is over. Leave the Flash demos for your website - the audience wants to see it live! Having someone at the senior management level do this is a refreshing change.

The session started out on a good note - I ended up sitting in the front row next to Steve Tennant (founder of the PeopleSoft Alumni Network), who was smart enough to find the power outlets embedded in the floor, and nice enough to share it with me.

As Paco got into the content, he shared some interesting statistics with everyone. In support of the statement that interest in PeopleSoft is still strong, he shared that there were over 250 new PeopleSoft customers last year and that customer retention rates are at high levels. Over 50% of the PeopleSoft customer base are now live on post-acquisition releases. Even folks that haven't been engaged for years are coming back alive (he told story of a government customer that was still on PeopleSoft 6 and was now upgrading to 9.1 based on some of the new functionality; PeopleSoft 6 shipped in 1996, so it's been 13 years)

He also talked about the fact that out of the 21 new solutions in PeopleSoft 9.1, only 3 are new products (meaning that there are additional license fees) - the rest are included, so it's part of what your maintenance money goes for. Across the board 9.1 has 1350 new features and 150+ customers were directly involved in the product planning, beta testing of 9.1. As a result of the underlying enhancements in PeopleTools 8.50 (which is the minimum PeopleTools release for the 9.1 apps), 28,000 pages now have Web 2.0 functionality.

In addition to having a number of demonstrations during his session, he also talked about the need for attendees to be able to easily articulate business value for why upgrading would make sense. In several cases he followed up the feature/function side with some hard numbers about financial impact (Steve Tennant was smarter than me by taking pictures of the slides while the session was going so hopefully he captured a few of these).

The high level breakdown of the business value was in 3 areas.

1. End users.
2. Line of business
3. Lower Cost of Ownership

End users were described as having been short-changed a bit in the past because of focus on specific feature/functions, but not as much on simplicity. One example that Paco demoed was getting a Treasury alert (via the new RSS feed functionality in PeopleTools 8.50) and then drilling in to a workbench that allowed some modeling of different financial options ("if I save X by paying some vendors early and taking a discount, can I put the money to better use?"), then collaborating via related discussion threads and then having some collaboration on different payment proposals over the internet. Nothing that couldn't have been accomplished before, but now it's simple enough that it can be demoed live in a keynote session (this was also the demo where Murphy showed up ; one of the pages didn't load properly on the first click so Paco had to logout and log back in and then was back in business.)

For the Line of Business category, Paco went through different things that have direct appeal to CFOs, CIOs, VP of HR. An example was announcing the new Oracle iReceipts for the iPhone. Bi-directional syncing with PeopleSoft Expenses is supported, including the ability to take a picture of a receipt and have that submitted directly for reimbursement. I would have killed for this when I was still at PeopleSoft and had to deal with the expense system.

Another example was showing some of the HCM functionality around Talent Management. Paco pulled up the Succession 360 view for succession planning. A very nice looking page showing current succession planning for a given person was shown with some drag and drop for re-arranging the view, etc. The supporting data popped up inline via the PeopleTools 8.50 Ajax support and showed off some slick comparison tools for looking at different potential candidates for a position (the demo user that he looked at was named Rosanna Channing, which kept making me think of the old Roseanne Roseannadanna character).

He also had an interesting technique for showing some of the Financials close process enhancements. The business process map showing the high level flow along with subordinate bullet points was augmented with customer logos for the customers that had worked with PeopleSoft development in that area for the 9.1 release (e.g. Sprint helping with the reconciliation process).

There was also discussion around the cost of ownership. One big example for improving this was surveying customers for the most common customizations that people implement and incorporating the main ones into the product.

There were some other interesting tidbits sprinkled in the presentation such as PeopleBooks is now available on the Kindle. Also, updated training and documentation were both available at PeopleTools 8.50 GA for the first time ever.

Labels: 2009, OpenWorld, PeopleSoft