PEOPLESOFT VOYAGES INTO MOBILE TERRITORY… but not quite to where no man has gone before
by Nicki Hayes, August 24, 2001
At its users conference in Atlanta next week, PeopleSoft will be shouting from the rooftops about its numerous customer wins in areas such as CRM, portals and professional services automation, as well as in its established stronghold of human resources applications. But this well-known vendor of enterprise solutions will also use the show as a platform for launching its attack on a relatively new market - that
of mobile CRM. Nicki Hayes, WDN's European correspondent, reports.
Earlier this summer WDN looked at how the mobile CRM race was heating up, indicating that if
PeopleSoft really had reached its target thin-client status then the finishing line was about to be moved
(www.wirelessdevnet.com/channels/wireless/features/newsbyte26.html).
Well, according to Chris van Loban Sels, PeopleSoft's product strategy director for mobile and wireless
technologies, that line has been moved, as PeopleSoft's customers are about to find out at its annual users
conference in Atlanta next week. At this conference PeopleSoft will announce the launch of its next
generation mobile technology, code named Voyager. This new technology leapfrogs legacy client/server
mobile technology delivering many benefits to the end user, as van Loban Sels explains:
"By driving instant access to enterprise applications through seamless deployment, ease of use, and pure
internet data synch technology, Voyager will vastly improve user adoption of mobile applications," he
advised.
"Although many of our competitors, including Oracle and SAP, claim to be extending internet-based
solutions to the wireless world they are not truly thin client - they still have the client/ server layer.
PeopleSoft's Voyager solution is truly thin-client. Its device footprint is hundreds of times smaller than
such client/server mobile solutions and delivers true universal access," he continued.
And by universal access van Loban Sels truly does mean universal - universal in terms of a user's location,
role (ie whether a customer, supplier or employee) and choice of internet-access method or device. Voyager
leverages internet standard technologies such as HTML, HTTP, and XML to facilitate this and does so in a
way that makes its simple deploy and use.
"Voyager rounds out our pure internet access technology. PeopleSoft already delivers industry leading,
pure internet access technologies for accessing our integrated applications from the office, over dialup, over
the internet, or via wireless devices. Through Voyager, end users can now do their jobs when they are not
connected to the internet too," explained van Loban Sels.
"Legacy client/server mobile solutions today have a very high failure rate due to the underlying complexity
of the technology they are based on. They are hard to install, update, upgrade, and use as a result of their
proprietary client/server architectures.
"Voyager is all about ease of access and use. It will install seamlessly to the end user's device, has an
intuitive web look and feel, and leverages pure internet XML synch technology. As a result PeopleSoft
believes it will be accepted and used much more than past mobile solutions have been," he advised.
Such an entrance into the mobile market it to be welcomed, but PeopleSoft is not charting unknown
territory, as Mitsui & Co. Ltd, a one hundred percent-owned subsidiary of the systems integration and
packaged software business BSI and one of the world's Top 20 largest companies, knows. This company
recently signed an Euro11 million distribution agreement deal with Irish based eCRM vendor eWare
precisely because it has an established thin-client CRM offering. Mr. Yoshino, the President of BSI, was
quick to recognize the benefits of this when he was introduced to eWare during a trade mission run by
Enterprise Ireland, commenting:
"eWare's technical advantage and mobile capability in the CRM field will be significant in the Japanese
market and will maintain BSI's leading edge technology reputation. The eWare product has a global appeal
and flexibility, built on the fact that it is internet-based. It is perfectly suited to the Japanese business
market as it provides an infrastructure that can truly leverage the high mobile and internet penetration that
exists in Japan, " he commented.
But eWare is not alone in building powerful partnerships. PeopleSoft will be announcing a few at their
annual users conference too, apparently:
"We are partnering with IBM for the data store on the mobile device for our mobile technology. IBM
Everyplace - a microdatabase - is being embedded within Voyager. This will simplify our database server
down to a mobile agent making it easier to distribute and to maintain than competitive solutions, such as
Siebel, which generally use a full database server.
"Additionally PeopleSoft will be partnering with Research In Motion (RIM) to deliver specific extensions
to the Voyager technology. This means that RIM Blackberry end users will be able to receive more timely
notification of events for example, a benefit which will enable collaborative decision-making," advised van
Loban Sels.
"Take the example of the sales representative under pressure to reach targets with just two days to go until
the end of the quarter. He's just come out of a meeting where he's been negotiating a major deal. Now,
thanks to the Voyager technology installed within his RIM Blackberry, he can send a new sales quote to his
sales president, who can immediately respond back by simply clicking a tick box and pressing send, no
matter where he or she is.
"Now compare this with what happens today. The sales rep comes out of the meeting and calls the sales
president on his cellular. There's no answer so he leaves a voicemail and keeps his fingers crossed that the
president will access it before the quarter closes," he concluded.
A pretty persuasive example of one of the benefits mobile CRM delivers I'm sure you'll agree - and the
sort of benefit we'll be seeing more of once GPRS becomes available. In Europe at least, RIM will be
launching with some of PeopleSoft's functionality built-in from day one of GPRS's deployment,
facilitating instant transaction-based emails for example. RIM will then add more applications as they see
how GPRS pans out. WDN for one will be a keen observer of such tactics and hopes to report on how the
market reacts at some point in the future.
Previous NewsByte... Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEC) - Gone in 15 Minutes
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About the author:
Nicki Hayes is a freelance writer and corporate communications consultant specialising in business to business internet issues. She has contributed editorial to a number of publications including Unstrung.com, Guardian Online, Financial Times, Banking & Financial Training, eAI Journal and Secure Computing. Nicki is also the European correspondent for The Wireless Developer Network. Nicki is based in Dublin, Ireland and also has a base in Cambridge, UK. Through her consultancy, Hayes-Singh Associates, she has access to a number of technical writers and PR consultants throughout Ireland and the UK.
About the WirelessDevNet (www.wirelessdevnet.com):
The Wireless Developer Network is an on-line community for information technology
professionals interested in mobile computing and communications. Our mission is to assist
developers, strategists, and managers in bridging the gap between today's desktop and
enterprise applications and tomorrow's mobile users communicating via wireless networks.
We are interested in supporting the deployment of these evolving technologies through
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downloads.
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