Oracle Updates PeopleSoft’s HCM Suite

Oracle on Wednesday unveiled the latest release of its PeopleSoft Enterprise suite, including Human Capital Management 9.1, PeopleTools 8.50, Learning Management 9.1 and Enterprise Portal 9.1.

Company officials said the refreshed application suite incorporated new features and functionality designed to accommodate the end user, empower upper management and reduce the total cost of ownership for organizations of any size.

PeopleSoft Enterprise HCM 9.1 includes 21 new apps, 1,350 new features, more than 28,000 pages enhanced with Web 2.0 capabilities, 300 new Web services and 200 industry-specific tools, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) officials said. It incorporates chat, wikis, discussion forums and tagging to improve collaboration and new dashboards that include embedded analytics to improve business insight and productivity.

Along with living up to Oracle’s Applications Unlimited commitment — a promise to provide not just support but tangible improvements to the bevy of core application suites acquired throughout the years — PeopleSoft 9.1 intends to improve productivity by incorporating context, ease of use and immediacy to HCM collaboration.

“What we’ve heard from HCM customers is they need better integration of information,” said Paco Aubrejuan, vice president and general manager of Oracle’s PeopleSoft unit. “Help me get the right person with the right skills to the right place at the right time. It seems like a simple statement but it’s really hard to do.”

With companies downsizing, right-sizing and rebuilding in the current economic climate, vendors like Oracle and SAP have plenty of competition for sales in a market that Gartner predicts will grow from $4.9 billion in 2007 to more than $6.5 billion by 2011.

Aubrejuan explains that Oracle’s PeopleSoft offering will stay one step ahead of the competition because its enterprise portal not only delivers discussion forums and wikis and other Web 2.0 tools but brings context to them with new features that understand and interact with the metadata that serves as the foundation for all business processes.

“We deliver a complete integrated view of workforce integration, recruitment and deployment,” he said.

The Enterprise Learning Management 9.1 component lets companies coordinate new and existing employee training programs used to meet corporate objectives as well as regulatory compliance standards.

PeopleTools 8.50, the enterprise technology platform, expands on the Web 2.0 theme with improved reporting and integration tools.

More important, especially to budget-conscious C-level executives, the platform is also backward-compatible, meaning that customers running older releases can still use the new features without upgrading their core application set.

Finally, the Enterprise Portal 9.1 feature lets companies build and deploy online communities and Web-based, self-service sites that tie into all the various business applications running on the corporate network.