SaaS Or is it?

Oracle have said that Fusion Apps will be available for deployment in a number of ways. One of these is SaaS. However, there is some dispute over what SaaS actually is. Oracle boss Larry Ellison appeared to suggest recently that multi-tenant SaaS as favoured by Workday, amongst others, was over hyped.

Some observers think that he doesn't care anyway since so much of the World's IT industry uses Oracle technology in one way or another - but wait. As far as I can tell so far, Workday doesn't. If that's true for any significant proportion of SaaS providers, if it catches on, it might give Oracle a thing or two to worry about.

I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs, but we are in interesting times in the software industry (well they are interesting to me, but maybe I'm just a sad geek).

Oracle Delivers Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Feature Pack Amidst Wide Customer Adoption of Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1

Snappy title eh? They know how to get to the point.

I'd have missed this but for a tweet from @PeopleSoft_Info - and that was tweeted again recently after initially appearing at the end of January.

In short, Oracle/PeopleSoft has a "new strategy" for releasing extra functionality between releases. It would appear that, possibly spurred by stuff like this from a prolific industry commentator, and an apparently growing acceptance (at least among the cognoscenti) that the future of HR Software lies in SaaS; Oracle has decided to release new functionality between formal releases.

For some reason, they have used the same announcement to trumpet the success of the latest version, 9.1, of PeopleSoft. According to Oracle:

Adoption of PeopleSoft 9.1 is over four times faster than previous PeopleSoft releases across all products. Over 1,000 customers are live on or deploying PeopleSoft 9.1. In addition, the customer base is expanding with over 350 new customers selecting PeopleSoft applications over the last 12 months.

I'm off to review these new features (and the Global Payroll Core ones recently announced) to see what they are offering.