As Published In May 2005

AGF sees benefits from the merger of PeopleSoft and Oracle.

Anytime two large companies merge, it can give their respective customers pause. Stephen Elioff, senior vice president of customer relationship management (CRM) for Toronto, Canada-based AGF Management, says he was initially nervous when he heard about the Oracle/PeopleSoft merger but quickly breathed a sigh of relief. He's seeing encouraging signs that the merging of the two companies will be good for AGF Management, and he's hopeful about the future.

All Together Now

Several years ago, AGF Management, which sells mutual funds via third-party distributors—stockbrokers, financial planners, and insurance agents—was evaluating CRM providers. The company wanted to improve productivity and customer service by trimming the time to resolution for customer inquiries. Although AGF had CRM applications in place, they were proprietary and the information was siloed, so customers often had to navigate AGF Management's internal business units on their own to find the right support. Elioff wanted something that would tie all of the company's divisions and its 1,500 employees—800 of whom would use the CRM program—together under one technology umbrella.

"Sales in our business are highly concentrated among a fairly small group of distributors, or advisors, as we call them," says Elioff. "What complicates things for us is that the turnover within that group of advisors from the beginning of the year until the end of the year is significant. In fact, even within the best of our sales territories, when the markets are in our favor, we experience turnover of more than 50 percent. This makes it critical for us to know who is selling our product, who is slowing down, and who is likely to speed up, so we can align our resources—our relationship managers and our solutions—with this key core group."

PeopleSoft by a Nose

After months of research, AGF Management narrowed the choices to two: Oracle and PeopleSoft. Both, says Elioff, were strong contenders. Both products, he says, would have enabled the company to better serve its customers. In the end, PeopleSoft won out, but only by a hair.

"PeopleSoft and Oracle—what they had going for them was flexibility within platforms," explains Elioff. "The two choices for us were very close; you couldn't get a piece of paper between them."

Scoping out the Future

PeopleSoft's CRM products joined a list of ERP and back-end software that, one could say, complements the merger announcement. Everything in AGF Management's IT portfolio comes from either Oracle or PeopleSoft. The company runs PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, Oracle Database, Oracle Human Resources, and Oracle Financials.

Still, when Oracle made its announcement, Elioff had some concerns. "We had established a fairly significant relationship with people at PeopleSoft. In particular, we had made inroads into the product advisory council. We were one of a very small group of people in the CRM area who had direct input into the product direction that the organization was taking, and we actually had seen quite a few of our suggestions make their way into the products and into beta versions of the products," he says. "So you move on to Oracle, which is a much larger organization and certainly, by reputation, has a different corporate culture."

Elioff also wondered what would happen to his company's financial investment. The AGF Management CRM installation is only a few years old; the first PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal launched in December 2002. If Oracle had retired the PeopleSoft CRM program, AGF would have to start from scratch, which would put it at a significant disadvantage. All the benefits and efficiencies his customers enjoy would be wiped out.

These worries, says Elioff, turned out to be completely unfounded. In keeping with Oracle's commitment to maintain more than 90 percent of PeopleSoft's support and development staff, nearly all of the account directors and service staff members with whom Elioff worked remain within the merged companies. In a true commitment to customer satisfaction, Oracle made a decision to use PeopleSoft's CRM software as a lead in the financial services industry.

"That gave us a very strong sense of 'Look, our platform is secure,' and that made us feel a lot more excited about where the product is going," Elioff says.

With Open Arms

Once Elioff realized that his product implementation was secure, he started looking at the additional benefits the combined companies could bring AGF. There are many, he says. Because AGF Management's industry is a mature one, Elioff states, getting the most out of the company's existing customers is imperative. "Growth for us is pretty much the same as it is for a lot of other industries," he says. "It's dependent on consumers who have limited resources available to put toward their savings. So we're much more like the packaged goods or beer business, where market share, which in our business is driven by share of wallet, becomes the overall determining factor."

Spotlight AGF Management www.agf.com AGF Management is a publicly traded asset management firm dealing primarily in Canada with a presence in Japan, Singapore, Ireland, England, and China. The company uses independent third parties for distribution of products and services. Location: Toronto, Canada Employees: 1,200 Annual revenue: C$650 million Oracle products: Oracle Database; Oracle E-Business Suite, including Financials and Human Resources PeopleSoft products: PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM Suite Version 8.4, including EPM Version 8.8 Other products and services: UNIX Platform, Sun Solaris, BearingPoint as the systems integrator for customer relationship management

That's where PeopleSoft's CRM software comes in. It lets Elioff observe advisor behavior in near-real time. Employees can use the software to determine when someone is likely to start or stop selling products. This allows AGF to allocate resources against specific opportunities.

"This means you're going to get there before the competition does, which will allow you to take that market share away," says Elioff. "That gives us an opportunity to be proactive about going after individuals. These are opportunities that, frankly, you don't normally see, because it's sort of a forest-and-tree situation. You're too close to the ground and to these individuals to catch these trends, and by the time you catch them, you've already overinvested time or money in an opportunity that really wasn't there."

No More Separation Anxiety

Elioff is happy with PeopleSoft's CRM, but the combination of CRM and Oracle's database and analytics, he says, will bring additional strength and depth to what he and his team are trying to do.

"Now that the database is owned by the same company, it allows the developers to take more advantage of some of the features in that database structure that will make the application that much stronger," says Elioff. "We're pretty excited about that and, similarly, the integration points between other ERP applications."

For example, AGF Management would like to bring human resources and financial information into its CRM application. Prior to the merger, this would have required custom development and some consulting with both companies' support staffs. Now, since Oracle has brought together PeopleSoft's support with its own, Elioff's IT and development staff have one point of contact for any questions or problems, so custom development will be easier.

"For our IT group, the people who have to support these applications, it will be a tremendous improvement for them, and it should bring some cost efficiencies into play," he says. "To no longer have to support two separate application platforms, two separate languages, and the like—to be able to have that offering through one company, one organization—will be a huge benefit to them from a hiring and maintenance perspective."

For More Information LEARN more about the combined companies and capabilities at oracle.com/peoplesoft.

On the application level, Elioff is excited about the unification of the PeopleSoft and Oracle developer teams. This, he says, will open up avenues that, separately, the two groups had never thought of. And as an end result, AGF Management's customers benefit.

"I know that most of the product groups, especially CRM, are really heads down, working toward what the fusion of the two products is going to look like," he says. "It allows us to make more-solid business decisions. If I can bring together financial information about my customers more cost-effectively, efficiently, and quickly and marry it with behavioral and value information about them, I can clearly determine what their needs are, figure out what their value is to my organization, and then make appropriate resource allocations to serve their needs."

Trend Watch Q&A Oracle Unveils Its Applications Strategy A commitment to customer satisfaction With the acquisition of PeopleSoft, Oracle is engaged with more applications and database customers and partners than any other company. Profit sat down with John Wookey, Oracle senior vice president of applications development. In our interview, Wookey unveils the combined Oracle and PeopleSoft applications strategy and support plans, including Oracle's commitment to support the PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards product lines until at least 2013, and Oracle's plan to release new versions of PeopleSoft Enterprise and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. He also details plans for Oracle Fusion, an information architecture and application set supporting the best elements of Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards products. He outlines the evolutionary path that all Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards customers will travel to achieve the huge benefits derived from the Oracle Information Architecture and standards-based business processes, which result in a lower total cost of ownership. PROFIT: What makes the PeopleSoft acquisition so exciting? WOOKEY: First, it's the size—the number of individuals, the size of the product sets, the experience that PeopleSoft has in the market, and the size of the customer group. The other is the quality of the people in product management, technology, architecture, development, and support. We offered positions to more than 90 percent of the support and R&D employees, and we have something like a 95 percent acceptance rate, so we're extremely pleased. PROFIT: You've talked about achieving market leadership, but you've also mentioned the balancing act between that and supporting products and customers. What are some of the key initiatives that help you achieve this balance? WOOKEY: Oracle and PeopleSoft are at a very similar juncture in terms of how much more application development we envision taking place in the current generation of technology, and how much we need to start shifting into the next generation. Our goal is to help customers achieve unprecedented levels of business efficiency and competitiveness by delivering products that reduce complexity and lower costs. PROFIT: So what can people expect to see from Oracle today and in the future? WOOKEY: To start with, we are still going to be supporting the existing product lines in their current technology architectures through 2013. As far as Oracle's plan to further enhance and support versions of PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards products, the estimated timeline is this—PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 in 2005, Oracle E-Business Suite 12 in 2006, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 in 2006, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12 in 2006. Ongoing JD Edwards World enhancements are planned to be delivered continuously. Our next-step plan is to make the first Fusion products, specifically data hubs and transaction bases, available sometime in 2006. Then in 2007 and 2008, you may start seeing Fusion-based applications such as human resources. PROFIT: What is Oracle Fusion, and why is it important? WOOKEY: Oracle Fusion is an Information Age architecture based on industry standards that will be modularized for flexible deployment, optimal performance, and easy maintenance. In the future, information-driven applications will incorporate key strengths of all product lines and focus on business process automation, industry-specific capabilities, superior usability, real-time information access and reporting, and a shared data model to provide customers with a single source of truth. Oracle Fusion will leverage the latest Oracle technology for scalability, availability, security, and performance. It embraces some changes that have been happening architecturally in systems development for the last decade and which have really come to maturity in the last several years around a concept called service-oriented architecture, or SOA. PROFIT: What are the benefits of SOA? WOOKEY: A standards-based SOA is more adaptive and cost-effective for customers, especially when integrating legacy systems. The advantage of Fusion's standards-based architecture is that customers will have a standard operating model around which to integrate other systems, which, in turn, will lower costs and support business processes more flexibly. The first phase of Oracle Fusion lays out this architectural model; the next phase will deliver applications on top of it. Oracle Customer Data Hub uses a lot of these principles—a central information model surrounded by a set of data management services and J2EE-compliant APIs that you can expose as Web services. PROFIT: It's one thing to mix-and-match applications in an integration project, but Oracle Fusion might sound to some people like rearchitecting or reimplementing. What is Fusion about from the apps perspective? WOOKEY: From the apps perspective, Fusion isn't about rearchitecting or reimplementation. It's really about trying to leverage the best of the best and bring together multiple, mutually supporting ideas and teams toward a single objective with the idea that every customer will one day be able to arrive at this point. We're building successor products that all customer groups will be able to leverage. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a way of building software applications that promotes connectivity between components so developers can reuse them. SOA implements business functionality as a set of shared, reusable services that are platform-, language-, and operating-system-independent. Rather than developing applications in isolated, monolithic blocks of code, SOA is flexible, so developers can quickly assemble applications to adapt to changing business strategies and processes. Developers like it because it's reusable and flexible; business decision-makers like it because software applications can quickly adapt to changing business needs.

A Handy Directory of Contact Information Oracle and PeopleSoft: Better Together Oracle and PeopleSoft are bringing together the best and brightest talent in the enterprise software industry. The combined companies plan to accelerate innovation and offer customers a superior solution at a lower price, representing more applications and database customers than any other company in the world. As the integration of Oracle and PeopleSoft proceeds, one thing will remain constant: an unrelenting support of your business. Clip and save this useful directory of contact phone numbers and Web addresses for future reference. Oracle Customer Care Centers Have a question about the impact that Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft will have on you? In North America, call +1.800.633.0925 (U.S.) or +1.800.633.0925 (Canada). For Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, visit oracle.com/peoplesoft/contact.html. PeopleSoft Customers Learn about Oracle's plan to enhance and support PeopleSoft products, upcoming releases, and future products. For more information, visit oracle.com/peoplesoft/customer.html. PeopleSoft Partners Oracle is committed to providing unwavering support for your business and your customers' satisfaction and retention. For more information, visit oracle.com/peoplesoft/partner.html. PeopleSoft Support Services If you're a PeopleSoft customer, you should continue to use the same support channels you've been using, whether they are online, via telephone, or through your customer account team. Your support phone numbers and Web site links remain the same. Oracle will communicate all changes and transitions to you well in advance through these familiar channels. For more information, visit peoplesoftcustomer.com. Oracle Support Services Find the phone number for the support hotline in your region—visit oracle.com/support/contact.html. Events Whether you're interested in events for IT professionals, developers, or line-of-business managers, you'll find it here. Visit oracle.com/events for more information. Global Contacts From North America to Europe and the Middle East, to Asia Pacific and everywhere else on the globe, Oracle and PeopleSoft together have resources for you. Visit oracle.com/corporate/contact/global.html for a list of global contacts. PeopleSoft Frequently Asked Questions Get answers to your frequently asked questions relating to Oracle and PeopleSoft. Visit oracle.com/peoplesoft/faq.html. Still have unanswered questions? Can't find what you're looking for? E-mail contact.oracle@oracle.com or call +1.800.633.0925 (U.S.).