Cloud vs On-Premise: Having Your Cake and Eating It Too
A few weeks ago at an Oracle conference, Mark Hurd, Oracle’s CEO, laid out the advantages of the Cloud:
- A lower cost of ownership
- Eliminating the need for expensive upgrades
- Brand new functionality delivered every few months versus every few years
- A simplified approach to applying updates and bug fixes.
What blew me away was that those are the same advantages attributed to the new PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) tool delivered with PeopleSoft 9.2. Furthermore, the PeopleSoft on-premise solution has the additional advantages of allowing a customer to choose when they take the updates (Cloud solutions force an acceptance timeframe) and allow for customization when it is necessary.
Admittedly, having spent the last twenty years working with the PeopleSoft solution, there is some bias; however we use, and have also implemented, Cloud solutions over the past seven years.
There are solid reasons to move to the Cloud but from my experience, those reasons, if you are a current PeopleSoft customer, should primarily be based on IT infrastructure elements. If you are an eBusiness, JDE or SAP customer, the Cloud benefits that Mark Hurd highlighted are real. But PeopleSoft is unique and is the only application in Oracle’s arsenal that could emulate the same benefits as Cloud with the application of the PUM tool. The reason this is true: PeopleSoft’s original architecture, specifically the metadata that exists for the PeopleSoft modules. A “PUM” like tool could not be created for the other Oracle applications. So PeopleSoft customers have options.
Today, when you layer in the PUM tool with the recently released PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface (providing the most state-of-the-art HTML 5 user experience), PeopleSoft customers should look long and hard at leveraging investments they’ve made and the experience their team has with the on-premise PeopleSoft application. This is one of those rare cases where you can have your cake and eat it too.
Please be sure to contact Larry Zagata if you have questions about any of the recent changes to PeopleSoft or ANY PeopleSoft questions.
