PeopleSoft outperforms competition in B2B vendor challenge

PeopleSoft Inc. recently outperformed leading eBusiness application companies in the "B2B Vendor Challenge", sponsored by the Open Application Group (OAG).

"The challenge," explains Jan Coetzee, MD of PeopleSoft SA, "presented real-life scenarios of interoperable business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce applications using OAG`s XML-based standards. OAG member companies - Ford Motors, Lockheed Martin and Lucent Technologies- issued the challenge to 21 eBusiness software vendors."

PeopleSoft demonstrated PeopleSoft 8 Purchasing and Order Management-part of its comprehensive "Supply Chain in a Box" solution-in a complex, end-to-end B2B purchasing scenario. The scenario required sending and receiving purchase orders, purchase order acknowledgements, shipment notifications, and invoices between applications from PeopleSoft, Oracle, J.D. Edwards, SAP, and a host of other eBusiness vendors.

"Vendors, such as PeopleSoft, have differentiated the architecture of their next generation products by providing a comparatively pure Internet architecture," comments Barry Wilderman, senior VP of META Group`s Application Delivery Strategies service.

PeopleSoft 8 performed well in three key areas:

Performance

PeopleSoft 8 required only a fraction of the computing power used by the other enterprise applications involved in the challenge. Throughout the live demonstration, PeopleSoft 8 ran from a standard laptop computer, as opposed to full-size servers used by the competition.

Pure Internet

PeopleSoft 8 was the only enterprise application to demonstrate the B2B scenario in a pure internet configuration. It also was the only enterprise application software that was accessed, executed, and monitored with nothing but a standard internet browser on a laptop computer.

Interoperability

PeopleSoft demonstrated its continued support for multi-vendor solutions by partnering with Extricity to translate PeopleSoft-generated XML into an OAG-compliant XML format. This enabled seamless communication with the other enterprise applications in the scenario. Though users of PeopleSoft 8 can easily configure PeopleSoft 8 to generate OAG-compliant XML on its own, PeopleSoft partnered with Extricity to show its flexibility and interoperability.