Encapsulate to Go Legacy
Encapsulating n-tier PeopleSoft Applications for Legacy Deployments
Posted on 3/22/2007
by Doug Daniels
As the marketing aura surrounding Oracle's Project Fusion begins to resemble Project Fiction, many PeopleSoft customers are looking to a simpler solution – GOING LEGACY. In the mainframe era, this was a common tactic of cutting costs and extracting maximum value from de-supported IT investments. For organizations with stable implementations and happy with current functionality, such a strategy represents one common sense alternative.
As with so many trends in our industry, we can look to the past for guidance. When IT investment shifted in the 1980's from mainframe and mini computers to client-server deployments, many shops chose to encapsulate their existing systems. Organizations wrapped their applications in a ‘digital bubble' that minimized change and maximized stability.
In this article, we examine the issues involved in a modern n-tier application encapsulation of PeopleSoft Enterprise.
Why Encapsulate: The Future is Off-Premise
Whether described as hosted, ASP, on-demand, or utility computing, most pundits agree that these off-premise computing delivery models will eventually overtake in-house IT deployments. The reason is simple – the current on-site, on-premise ERP delivery model is just too costly.
Admittedly the off-site model has been slow to emerge. But just as large firms once provided in-house electricity generation, such network centric activities like ERP are usually cheaper, faster, and better performed at some end point upstream. This leaves you to focus on the core business at hand. Indeed, history has shown that ever since client-server architectures were fraught with client side complexity we've been steadily moving toward increased IT simplification through centralization. The consumer software markets are ahead of Corporate IT in this realm, where a consumer's entire digital existence can already be housed in cyberspace.
Thus the argument behind yet another in-house upgrade or migration to a new ERP platform (i.e. Fusion) is superseded by the rapidly emerging off-premise delivery model. Such a trend begs the question: Why invest in a costly upgrade or migration NOW, when it is certain that we will be faced with a major investment to move our ERP off-site in the next decade?
To continue reading this article you must have a current VP1 Subscription.
