Newsletter January 2005

IT People Are From Mars, Users Are From Venus

• The Oracle-Peoplesoft Merger: Living Without Vendors
• The Lesson: Self-Reliance

Happy New Year from Red Three Consulting! We hope you all had a happy holiday season and look forward to working with you in 2005.

The Oracle-PeopleSoft Merger: Living Without Vendors

Without doubt, the biggest and most important news in the software world right now is the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft by Oracle. When Oracle first announced its intention to acquire PeopleSoft a year and a half ago, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to happen. I was wrong. Many users of PeopleSoft software are upset, worried that Oracle will not keep its promises of continued support. And although Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said he will support PeopleSoft applications for 10 years and develop PeopleSoft 9, user concerns are far from baseless.

Why so? Ellison has argued that consolidation was justified because there is no functional difference between the various competitors in the field. At the same time, however, the two products are very different in design. To use an automotive analogy, either a BMW or a Mercedes will get you to your destination swiftly and in comfort, but if you had both, you would need two very differently trained mechanics to keep everything running. So, if the Oracle and PeopleSoft systems are so similar in function yet different in design, will Ellison really pay to keep two sets of designers and programmers on staff?

For more on the merger, see Computerworld.

The Lesson: Self-Reliance

There are two fundamental things to be learned here: You can't count on your software company for anything, and you must always be ready to stand on your own.

1. You can't count on your software company for anything.

Therefore, you must plan to keep your system running regardless of what happens. This means disaster recovery. Over the past 20 years, business owners stopped creating most of their own business software and started buying it from outside suppliers. By doing so, they thought, they would avoid reinventing the wheel and gain the advantage of outside product support. But as the experience of PeopleSoft shows, buying from the largest vendor is no longer a guarantee of any kind of support, no matter what anyone says.

2. You must always be ready to stand on your own.

A lot of business owners assume that if their software vendor is handling maintenance, then they have bought a certain level of security. If everything goes wrong, they'll have someone to put it all back together again. But this merger proves that the assumption is no longer true. Sure, you can have support in exchange for a tremendously high cost-being at the mercy of the whims of the software vendor. But if you want true independence, you need to stand on your own, which means planning for "what if." What if you had a problem and needed to put your system back together again? Could you? Do you have a disaster recovery plan in place that doesn't rely on your original vendors?

If you don't and feel that you should, contact us.

Red Three Consulting: Transforming Information Technology into Answer Technology