Conway Vows Support For J.D. Edwards Lines As PeopleSoft Releases Upgrade

"Oracle has failed because of you. The saga is over," Conway said, drawing lively applause from the audience.

Oracle has extended $7.25 billion tender offer as it awaits regulatory approval.

In contrast to Oracle's hostile intentions, Conway said People's acquisition of J.D. Edwards was about improving and expanding both companies' product lines and markets. "Every single customer will have more," he said.

PeopleSoft is rebranding J.D. Edwards product lines as PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne, its primary line, and PeopleSoft World, which run on the IBM AS/400 platform. PeopleSoft's own applications are being rebranded as PeopleSoft Enterprise. Conway said the company plans to continue selling and enhancing all three lines.

At the conference, PeopleSoft announced availability of a major upgrade to PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne, which includes 400 enhancements across 30 modules.

While most of the upgrades had been in the works under J.D. Edwards, Peoplesoft is introducing a new user interface that will give the application a common look and feel with PeopleSoft Enterprise, Rick Bergquist, PeopleSoft chief technology officer, said in an interview.

The company has not yet worked out plans for how it intends to merge J.D. Edwards partner channel into the Peoplesoft fold, but Bergquist said the existing J.D. Edwards program will remain intact. "You can expect we're going to enhance and expand" the channel program, he said.

In his keynote address, Conway pointed to J.D. Edwards' strength with mid-market companies as one key synergy in the acquisition. "The roadmap is about product expansion, not consolidation," he said.

Conway also announced that PeopleSoft was introducing an enhanced customer support policy for customers that delay moving to new releases. Customer will continue to receive upgrade scripts to the current release for five years and patches for tax and regulatory related changes for up to six years. That support had previously been available for four years.

He positioned the policy change as being in line with PeopleSoft's "Total Ownership Experience" initiatives, designed to reduce the time and cost of implementing and managing enterprise applications and increase ease of use.

As part of the initiative, the company is introducing tools for automating the installation and configuration of PeopleSoft software and for deploying patches and fixes on live systems. The next release of the company's financial management software in the fourth quarter will be the first module to include the tools, Bergquist said.

PeopleSoft is also delivering various integration packs for Oracle and SAP applications.

"PeopleSoft believes improving the ownership experience will be the differentiator in enterprise software," Conway said.