Why There Doesn’t Need to Be a PeopleSoft 9.3
Great blog post over at The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog about a brief interview with Oracle’s Paco Aubrejuan. Aubrejuan is the Senior VP of Development for PeopleSoft. You can watch the whole session here, but you need to login to Quest to do so.
The best parts came during the Q&A session after Aubrejuan’s presentation. The most interesting quips were as follows:
On the PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM):
We’re calling our model PeopleSoft Selective Adoption … and let me be specific about what it means, we’re going to deliver new capabilities about 2 to 3 times a year (and may deliver some functionality more frequent than that). Once you’re on 9.2 you can get this functionality without upgrading ever.
On the prospect of PeopleSoft 9.3:
Should I upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.2 or should I wait for 9.3? There is no 9.3. We don’t have a 9.3 codeline, there’s no 9.3 plan, our plan is to never do a 9.3 and we’re going to continuously deliver on 9.2 using the PeopleSoft Selective Adoption and so you should not be waiting for a 9.3. … We’re just going to continue extending the timelines for PeopleSoft 9.2 so the idea is that there is no more upgrade and premier support will just continue.
On exactly why a PeopleSoft 9.3 isn’t necessary:
The risk we take with saying that there’s no 9.3 is that people read into that and say that PeopleSoft is dead. … That’s not true. The investment level that we’re making in the product does not change with this delivery model at all. … We’re delivering all the Fluid functionality without a new release. We’ve never done that before. The only thing that this is comparable to is the 8.0 version when we moved from client-server to the internet, and that was a major release. We’re now doing something equivalent to that without even a minor release. It’s now just selective features that you can take as long as you’re on 8.54. So PeopleSoft is not dead, and having no PeopleSoft 9.3 does not mean that PeopleSoft is dead.
That’s important, as many off-the-cuff reactions will feel that no PeopleSoft 9.3 = the end of PeopleSoft. Not true. It’s the end of PeopleSoft with the old delivery and versioning approach, and the very beginning of continued investment in PeopleSoft with selective features being delivered under the PUM model.
A new direction sometimes means unlearning old patterns and ways of thinking.
