With release 6.0 of its product out of the door (CI No 3,043), PeopleSoft Inc now looks set to address public sector, federal, and student administration markets this year. It’s also planning to open for business in Japan through a new subsidiary lead by a former IBM Corp applications general manager. PeopleSoft has added double byte and Kanji support to PeopleTools and is working to localize and translate general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, asset management and human resources for next quarter. Late in 1997 or early in 1998, it is also expected to enter the retail industry through a partnership with retail merchandise management company Intrepid Inc, which will have re-written its merchandise management system in PeopleTools by year-end. Intrepid’s Merchandise Management will be integrated with PeopleSoft Financials. PeopleSoft will be able to resell the resulting product and has made undisclosed investment in Intrepid to seal the deal. PeopleSoft 7 is due by early next year, with support for distributed N-tier architecture where clients, application logic, and the database can all be resident on different machines connected by messaging middleware. PeopleSoft’s Public Sector HRMS is due this quarter; Public Sector Financials is due in the second quarter along with a Student Administration beta. Federal HRMS and Federal Payroll are due in the third quarter of this year.
