PeopleSoft Inc. displayed its commitment yesterday to two markets it has been trumpeting for the past year, disclosing partnerships in the higher-education and business-intelligence markets.

The company says it's on track to deliver a Balanced Scorecard application, a component of its enterprise-performance-management suite of analytical applications, in the fourth quarter of this year. PeopleSoft said it will work with IT consulting firm KPMG and the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative Inc., an organization created to evangelize the balanced-scorecard concept. The partnerships will help PeopleSoft add so-called best practices into its product.

"PeopleSoft has placed a stake in the ground as an analytical application provider. The question is how they will sell it to the market," says Joshua Greenbaum, principle of Enterprise Applications Consulting. "A lot of customers are still trying to get their ERP systems up and running. Enterprise-performance management is a luxury at this point."

In a bid for a piece of the higher-education market, PeopleSoft announced partnerships with Universal Learning Technology and Blackboard Inc., both of which provide tools for building online curricula and learning applications. PeopleSoft plans to integrate these tools with its own higher-education software, called PeopleSoft e-Campus Community.