Let me try and summarise my OpenWorld Day 2. The sky is blue and the walls are red with the only clouds being those mentioned in all the Oracle advertising.
The opening PeopleSoft session of the day was Paco Aubrejuan (Senior Director of Product Strategy) delivering the high level Product Line Update and Investment Strategy. It's true to say that there's been a significant amount of investment in PeopleSoft over recent years and that's planned to continue.
- 2013 Selective Adoption and first Update Image released
- 2014 Fluid user interface
- 2016 Page Composer / Fluid Approvals and Elasticsearch
- 2017 Cloud Manager
Oracle continues to invest because there's over 5000 PeopleSoft customers. 72% of these are on release 9.2 but a notably low count of only 500 live on Fluid. Paco's message was one of assuring customers of Oracle's continued commitment to invest in PeopleSoft applications and technology. This commitment to support PeopleSoft is at least until 2027 and there was every expectation that each year that would get extended. He encourage customers to continue to exploit all the features and enhancements delivered to date taking advantage of the PeopleSoft continuous delivery model and the availability of innovative and value added services on Oracle Compute Infrastructure.
Paco showcased several customers that had fast-tracked new application features and then gave a live demo of the new HCM Onboarding feature and a live demo of new eBill applications in Financials and the Supplier Portal.
Later that day I sat through Dave Bains' PeopleSoft Technology strategy in which I heard that Oracle are continuing investment in Lifecycle Management, deployment automation and Cloud manager. Oracle's website has a quote which I'm sure is true of many IT operations in that we spend a lot more time on maintenance than we do on delivering value and innovations. It seems PeopleSoft future investment will continue to be in this area - helping customers reduce their maintenance costs and realise this vision.
Because PeopleTools 8.56 was released a few months ago now the news of enhancements to Event Mapping and Page, Field Configurator and Cloud Manager were not new.
Cloud Manager got a much more thorough coverage by Platforms Strategy Manager, Mark Hoernemann. Basically Cloud Manager is a new PeopleSoft application which provides a self-service like interface to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services and allows users to provision and patch instances of PeopleSoft running in the Oracle Cloud.
My final session of the day was my own which explored Selective Adoption and how using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Manager can help. I'm going to blog more on this in the coming weeks but for now here's my presentation.
Comments
The very first picture looks very similar to the one of last year OOW :
http://i-like-trains.blogspot.nl/2016/09/openworld-2016-day-2-monday.html
Amazingly, even though a little bit less red, Oracle was already Cloud oriented in 2014... at least on the picture :
http://i-like-trains.blogspot.nl/2014/09/oow-2014-main-theme.html
Cheers,
Nicolas.