PeopleSoft Inc. has decided to set a new trend by announcing it will focus heavily on enterprise service automation (ESA) in the coming year.
President and CEO Craig Conway told attendees at PeopleSoft Connect in Atlanta that service spending is huge for organizations, and automating the process is an important part of building a collaborative enterprise.
Conway noted that recent studies showed the majority of spending is not related to daily operations, but rather to service spending, “and there’s been virtually no automation of this spending,” he said.
Conway added that service spending is hard to manage. “It’s a combination of human management, procurement and financial management,” he said.
Although PeopleSoft ESA was officially launched today, Conway told Connect delegates that in the past six months it has sold more than 80 implementations.
He said PeopleSoft’s ESA is an integrated suite for management of all types of service in one’s company, including resource management, project management, time and billing, travel contracts and embedded analytics.
“ESA is at the same stage right now that CRM was at four or five years ago,” Conway stated. “You’re going to see an enormous amount of resources committed to ESA by PeopleSoft.”
Conway also touched on PeopleSoft’s portals in his keynote. He called this the most exciting time in technology’s history.
“There are certain points in the history of technology where technology changed the world,” he said, pointing to the introduction of the mainframe, mini-computer, PC and the Internet as key points in time.
He said that portals are an intelligent use of the Internet. He stressed that PeopleSoft has a pure Internet portal structure, with no code on the client.
“There are huge benefits of moving core business processes to the Internet,” Conway said. “There is of course cost reduction. But the real benefit is the impact on the business processes themselves. Core business processes become lightning fast. Communication is instantaneous. This is the new way of doing business.”
PeopleSoft Inc. in Pleasanton, Calif. is at http://www.peoplesoft.com
