PeopleSoft Inc this week announced plans to expand its sales channels to the mid-market sector by signing exclusive reseller agreements with systems implementers in 28 markets across the US. The move is part of the enterprise resource planning vendor’s mid-market push, called PeopleSoft Select, first announced a year ago. The company also announced it will go ahead with its plans to offer its applications on an outsourced basis, through partnerships with US Internetworking and Corio. The service will be offered under its SelectSourcing Application Service Provider channel.
PeopleSoft Select was set up to provide small and mid-sized organizations – those companies with revenues less than $250m – with packaged ERP software and hardware bundles. Initially sales were direct via PeopleSoft implementation centers in four major metropolitan areas – San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Atlanta. The extended offering will see resellers offer those same services in 28 other locations. The aim, according to Jeffrey Read, director of marketing for PeopleSoft’s Select Business Division, is to enable customers to have greater access to consulting services, implementation tools and training. In addition, customers will only have to deal with one reseller to get the entire package, from consulting to installing the hardware and software. The company is currently negotiating deals with resellers and said it will make announcements as and when the deals are signed. All 28 resellers are expected to be up and running by the third quarter 1999. Read added that the partnerships would be exclusive so that the reseller will only sell PeopleSoft software in return for exclusive rights to their particular territory.
The ERP vendor also announced the Advantage Server program, a service that offers servers pre-configured and pre-loaded with the customer’s choice of PeopleSoft applications. It has two components. The Advantage Server Factory, located in Atlanta, Georgia, takes the customers’ requirements and matches them to pre-defined hardware and software configurations. Those bundles are then shipped to regional implementation factories that implement the software based on customer requirements. PeopleSoft currently has four such implementation sites in Atlanta, New Jersey, Chicago and Pleasanton, California, but the company said it intends to add others in due course.
