Peoplesoft claims superiority over Oracle

Peoplesoft has launched its next generation of customer relationship management products, claiming its technological advances leapfrog offerings from arch-rivals Siebel and Oracle.

The company claims its decision to base Peoplesoft 8 CRM around the ubiquitous web browser interface offers a major advantage over the competition.

Craig Conway, CEO of Peoplesoft, said: "Most CRM projects fail because users don't want to use the software. Universal access through the browser is a major step forward in overcoming that."

The software also has built-in analytical tools, which emerged from nine months development work on technology from Vantive - a company Peoplesoft acquired in 1999.

Conway admitted that when it bought Vantive, Peoplesoft's entire development effort was focused on the HR, financial and supply chain products.

"We didn't have any resources when we bought Vantive. All our developers were working on the other products. But when that work was completed, we shifted a core of 100 developers over to CRM," he said.

Conway went on to claim that the integration of analytical tools within Peoplesoft 8 CRM is key.

He said: "This is not a new idea. When word processors were created you had to buy a separate spellchecker. Eventually the spellchecker was integrated with the word processor, because that's where it should be. Until now, analytical tools had to be bought separately - now they are built into the application."

Peoplesoft 8 CRM will be available from 29 June in six modules - sales, marketing, support, field service, helpdesk and interactive management. It will ship in 10 languages, and supports IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases on IBM mainframe, Unix and Windows NT platforms.