PeopleSoft boss sees more business ahead

With integration between the two global enterprise software majors chugging along smoothly, the new look PeopleSoft has now over 250 products in its portfolio to offer customers.

Ram Gupta, executive vice president, product and technologies, PeopleSoft, and the man responsible for the largest division in the company, with about 4,500 employees reporting into him, said," With the merger between PeopleSoft and J D Edwards the opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell to our existing client base is huge. The most important thing is that PeopleSoft and JD Edwards have a non-complementary suite of products, " Gupta said.

In an internal estimate, the now $3 billion PeopleSoft expects the worldwide cross-sell opportunities to be worth $35 million alone in license revenues in 2004.

In India, the combined entity of PeopleSoft and J D Edwards has 120 customers. "The Indian market is our number one market in the Japan and Asia Pacific region and we are focussing a lot of our energies in this market. This is a very important market," Gupta said.

It is understood that Gupta while addressing employees at Hexaware's development centre in Bangalore said, "The Oracle saga is over".

It is also now understood that the Oracle's aggressive bid for PeopleSoft may fall through because of resistance from various government departments in the US.

The US Government and its various agencies are big customers of PeopleSoft and if Oracle succeeds in its $7.3 billion bid then it would mean millions of dollars in additional investment from existing PeopleSoft customers, industry watchers point out.

In India PeopleSoft has existing software developer relationships with Hexaware and Covansys.

PeopleSoft's relationship with Covansys is courtesy its acquisition of J D Edwards.

Gupta said that the relationship with Hexaware was growing on expected lines and the recently opened development centre would ramp up to have about 700 developers by the end of three years.

PeopleSoft, according to Gupta had also invested into developing new tools that keeping the customer in focus.

"We have subjected our applications to usability engineering and have also developed self-diagnostic tools that would help our customers understand the problems they are facing with their applications.

With the merger, PeopleSoft has now additional product presence in asset management, real estate management, and manufacturing.

With the merger it is expected that PeopleSoft will have three product families under the brands -PeopleSoft Enterprise, PeopleSoft Enterprise One, and PeopleSoft World.

Gupta said the accent on pruning costs in the merged entity would be restricted to bringing down general and administrative costs.

In the next 30-180 days PeopleSoft will execute on two key integration opportunities in bringing more products and solutions to existing customers and also transferring intellecutal property within the organisation.