Showing the way to PeopleSoft

Pentathlon Systems Resources Inc., a young local ICT consulting services company and distributor of collaborative software from J.D. Edwards, will show PeopleSoft Inc. the way to the local enterprise market.

Although it’s not yet decided whether Pentathlon will be the only one to distribute, support and maintain PeopleSoft products in the Philippines, Pentathlon already expects to close its first PeopleSoft customer account by next month.

Last July 17, PeopleSoft Inc. purchased approximately 110 million shares, or 88 percent of the outstanding shares of J.D. Edwards & Co. PeopleSoft expects to acquire the remaining shares of J.D. Edwards before the end of next month.

The two companies also announced that Michael Maples, a member of the J.D. Edwards board of directors, was elected to the board of directors of PeopleSoft.

In a statement, PeopleSoft president and CEO Craig Conway said the combination of PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards creates the second largest enterprise applications software company in the world.

"The combination expands not only our customer base, product offerings and markets, but also our talent," Conway added.

For his part, Bob Dutkowsky, J.D. Edwards chairman, president and CEO, said that with the acquisition, the two companies combined will have more resources to invest in solving their customers’ most pressing business problems.

"We’re combining two extraordinary and highly complementary companies that together will set a new standard in serving the needs of enterprise application software customers," Dutkowsky said.

Earlier, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp., made an offer to buy all the common stock of PeopleSoft, saying the company couldn’t survive on its own. Oracle also extended its deadline to July 18 for PeopleSoft shareholders to accept its offer.

Meanwhile, the few PeopleSoft customer sites in the Philippines are mostly multinational firms being supported by the business software company’s regional office in Singapore.

Helen Macasaet, Pentathlon’s president and CEO, told NetWorks that they would soon organize an executive briefing program to introduce PeopleSoft’s customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), financial management and other enterprise software to local clients.

Pentathlon was appointed as J.D. Edwards’ vertical distributor for the manufacturing, high-tech electronics manufacturing, publishing and distribution sectors only this year.

Macasaet said they welcome the successful combination of PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards, saying this would allow them to cover not only the mid-market but also large enterprise accounts.

"PeopleSoft products cover more the larger organizations that need real-time enterprise applications. They complement J.D. Edwards’ collaborative enterprise software products, which are more for the mid-market," Macasaet said.

Pentathlon is a three-year old company currently with 50 staffers. It offers software development and implementation of CRM, ERP, Web-based, datawarehousing and other business intelligence tools and applications.