Wednesday, 30 August 2006

Oracle Delivers PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management 9

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 9. Highlights of this release include new enhancements designed specifically for the financial services and communications industries, usability enhancements designed to help increase productivity and increased use of Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware.

Oracle has also increased integration between it and other PeopleSoft products. For example, the new offering now integrates with PeopleSoft Workforce Rewards so users can more easily assess the likely impact on their operations of different compensation models.

"PeopleSoft CRM 9.0 offers DePaul University the best of both worlds; the option to take advantage of next generation technology using Oracle Fusion Middleware components, while enabling us to leverage the new application enhancements," said DePaul University CRM Craft Team Leader Audrey Bledsoe. "PeopleSoft CRM 9.0 will alleviate the need for several of the DePaul specific customizations and integration points we've developed in our CRM 8.9 environment. We are looking for ways to decrease maintenance time. This release should help."

Oracle has also released an upgrade to its free tool for building Web applications that access Oracle databases. Oracle Application Express Release 2.2, or APEX, was known in previous incarnations as HTML DB.

"We think it's a unique product," said Oracle VP of software development, Mike Hichwa. "It's kind of like Microsoft Access but it's not a thick client. It's kind of like Ruby and PHP but it's not really scripting and it's not a framework in a 3GL like C# or J2EE," Hichwa said. Like APEX, Ruby and PHP also are designed for building simple, straightforward Web applications, Hichwa said. But these scripting languages are more complicated than APEX.