Oracle has announced that it will continue to support
and enhance its current applications (Oracle,
PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel) beyond the
release of the Fusion product line. The Fusion
applications would then become just another
product line, and not a forced upgrade path.
This would leave Oracle with five separate
products to be supported on an ongoing basis.
This seems to be quite a change from the original
situation, in which Oracle's plans appeared to
be to acquire PeopleSoft
just to get its customers, shutting down the
PeopleSoft line and migrating the customers
to the Oracle product. That changed to a plan
to support existing PeopleSoft installations
for a while. Later, Oracle promised to
support PeopleSoft until 2013. The latest
announcement would seem to drop even the 2013
deadline.
How can this be done? Oracle says that the
scale of its installed base ("30,000 satisfied
customers" across the four existing lines)
allows it to continue to invest in the
applications.
Of course Oracle would prefer to migrate
customers to Fusion, but it is now specifically
offering continued new releases and
no forced upgrades.
I admit to being surprised by this and hope
that it helps to extend the expected
lifetimes of our PeopleSoft installations.
