PeopleSoft and IBM Announce Most Significant Enterprise Applications Alliance in History of the Two Companies

At its Connect 2004 user conference September 21, PeopleSoft Inc. and IBM announced that they will establish the most significant enterprise applications alliance in the history of the two companies. As part of the new alliance, PeopleSoft will standardize its industry-leading applications on the market-leading IBM middleware platform, and both companies will market the joint solutions. PeopleSoft and IBM also announced they will collaborate to deliver new, pre-integrated industry solutions and establish the first business process interoperability lab.

PeopleSoft will integrate IBM middleware and development tools -- including core components of WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Business Integration, WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Studio Application Developer -- with its portfolio of applications, fostering innovation across both company's products through the combination of thousands of IBM infrastructure developers and PeopleSoft application developers.

The two companies will jointly market the combined offerings to solve customers' business and technical challenges. Both parties will also contribute resources, domain expertise, integration technologies and funding for marketing and sales programs.

"This is the largest and most significant agreement that PeopleSoft and IBM have ever made," said PeopleSoft's President and CEO Craig Conway. "Today we have eclipsed the competition by bringing together the most flexible and adaptable applications software with the strongest, most open middleware infrastructure in the world."

"Combining PeopleSoft's industry-leading applications with IBM's superior middleware provides customers with a significant opportunity to integrate business processes throughout their organization, leading them down the path to becoming an on demand business," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. "Customers are seeking innovative solutions that won't lock them into a proprietary platform. Combining industry-leading applications and infrastructure technology provides customers with offerings that can help them solve their business challenges more quickly."