PeopleSoft, Inc. was a company that provided Human resource management systems (HRMS), customer relationship management, Manufacturing, Financials, Enterprise Performance Management, and Student Administration software solutions to large corporations, governments, and organizations. PeopleSoft is also the name of the company's product suite.

History

Founded in 1987 by David Duffield and Ken Morris, PeopleSoft was originally headquartered in Walnut Creek, California before moving to Pleasanton, California. PeopleSoft began with an idea Duffield had about a "Client-Server" version of Integral Systems popular mainframe HRMS package. Once Integral declined development, Duffield was released to pursue this endeavor on his own, and PeopleSoft was born. In 2003, when the company acquired J.D. Edwards, it decided to differentiate its former product line with those of Edwards by renaming both products. In January 2005, PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle Corporation. PeopleSoft products continue to be used.

Product design

PeopleSoft's product suite (also called PeopleSoft) was initially based on the Client-Server architecture. The entire software suite moved to a web-centric design called Pure Internet Architecture (PIA) with the release of PeopleSoft Version 8. The new format allowed all of a company's business functions to be accessed and run on a web client. Originally, a small number of security and system setup functions still needed to be performed on a fat client machine, however, this is no longer the case. The inherent nature of Internet-based applications allowed for a straightforward transition from a client-server model Fact: date=August 2007. One important feature of PeopleSoft's PIA is that no code is required on the client - there is no need for additional downloads of plugins, or JVMs such as the Jinitiator required for Oracle Applications.

The architecture is built around PeopleSoft's proprietary PeopleTools technology. (development platform similar to a 4GL) PeopleTools includes many different components a developer needs to create an application, including a scripting language called PeopleCode, design tools to define various types of metadata, standard security structure, and batch processing tools. The metadata describes data for user interfaces, tables, messages, security, navigation, portals, and so forth. The benefit of creating their own development platform allowed PeopleSoft applications to run on top of many different operating systems and database platforms. Currently, it is not tied to any specific database platform. PeopleSoft implementations exist or have existed on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix, Sybase, IBM DB2 (including its z/OS, Unix and OS/400 variants), Oracle Rdb and HP AllBase/SQL.

All of PeopleSoft's modules (Human Resources, Supply Chain, Financials, CRM, etc.) are built with the PeopleTools technology. A benefit of the technology is that all the code which makes up a module can be customized to suit a company's business needs. An auxiliary product, PeopleCode, is an object-oriented proprietary language used to express business logic for PeopleSoft applications.