When I last "dealt with" PeopleSoft, the standard operating procedure was:
1) Pay PeopleSoft/Oracle a metric f--kton of money.
2) A CD arrives in the mail. (This little envelope cost $800,000?)
3) Your PeopleSoft consultants show up, laugh at that CD (tossing it into the microwave) and pull out their own distros with a zillion customizations that they proceed to spray over your servers. You have no idea what they are actually installing.
4) You get out a firehose, fill it with money, and keep showering the consultants with cash until you are sure they won't succeed in delivering anything worthwhile, and you fire them.
I was only installing a local test instance of PeopleSoft (to do some integration work with another product). Somehow the PS consultants in the area got wind that someone in my company was doing an install, and I started getting all kinds of cold calls offering customization and optimization, with some of the most condescending and customer-hostile attitudes I've encountered. PS had pretty a pretty shitty ecosystem 15+ years ago, and it doesn't sound improved. I'd hate for anyone nontechnical to be at their mercy.
I was privvy to discussions surrounding a search for a university president. One of the candidates dropped out when he heard that the university was replacing a perfectly functional home brewed accounting system with PS - it had brought his previous university to its knees and he didn't want to ever deal with it again.
That's so depressing. What really gets me is just how bad the actual Peoplesoft product is: in my experience it's unreliable, poorly designed and unpleasant to interact with.
My company recently switched away from Peoplesoft fortunately.
1) Pay PeopleSoft/Oracle a metric f--kton of money.
2) A CD arrives in the mail. (This little envelope cost $800,000?)
3) Your PeopleSoft consultants show up, laugh at that CD (tossing it into the microwave) and pull out their own distros with a zillion customizations that they proceed to spray over your servers. You have no idea what they are actually installing.
4) You get out a firehose, fill it with money, and keep showering the consultants with cash until you are sure they won't succeed in delivering anything worthwhile, and you fire them.
I was only installing a local test instance of PeopleSoft (to do some integration work with another product). Somehow the PS consultants in the area got wind that someone in my company was doing an install, and I started getting all kinds of cold calls offering customization and optimization, with some of the most condescending and customer-hostile attitudes I've encountered. PS had pretty a pretty shitty ecosystem 15+ years ago, and it doesn't sound improved. I'd hate for anyone nontechnical to be at their mercy.