(Pleasanton, CA) – Some companies make great weather vanes. Could there be a connection, for example, between PeopleSoft’s strong financial performance in 2001 – with 20% sales growth to about $1.8 billion – and its announcement this week that the next release of its PeopleSoft 8 line of business apps will support Web services?

Make no mistake: Craig Conway, CEO of the Pleasanton, California - based PeopleSoft, Inc., is already one of the best-paid CEOs in corporate America. And cofounder and chairman Dave Duffield too is an accomplished software industry executive and visionary – as well as being the driving force behind the company's market direction and commitment to services. So when they aim to make PeopleSoft 8 support Web services, they do so because they believe they can hoist PeopleSoft revenues and grow its market-share, not because they are blindly following some new enterprise software fad.

Assuming that the economy will recover next year, so that large corporations resume technology-project spending, a 25% earnings surge for the company is not out of the question, according to industry analysts.

PeopleSoft 8 is essentially a suite of customer relationship management (CRM) software written to run on the Internet. So it’s well positioned to take advantage of Web services, especially the alluring promise of Microsoft–J2EE compatibility. In practical terms, according to PeopleSoft CTO Rick Bergquist, what will happen is that the PeopleSoft 8 line of apps in human resources, finance, and manufacturing will include software tools to let client businesses build and run their own Web services.

PeopleSoft is also going to include a number of pre-defined Web services “to give customers a kick start,” says Bergquist – and when like PeopleSoft you have 3,000 customers in total, including more than 350 new ones since January 1, that amounts to a huge shove to the overall Web services bandwagon, helping move it beyond just the early-adopters and the innovators and into the corporate mainstream.

Bergquist points out that while Web services can perform simple tasks, such as online insurance quotes or credit checks, such services can also be combined and personalized to carry out more complex business tasks. “For example, managing purchasing contracts with suppliers over the Web,” he adds. “And the good thing about the Web services standards is they’re being embraced by both Microsoft and the J2EE world, so you have one standard that enables you to communicate between applications, not matter what technology they’re built on.” In a year when, unlike thousands of companies worldwide and in contrast to German software giant SAP, PeopleSoft didn’t lay off a single employee or ask anyone to take a voluntary pay cut to swell the company's bottom line, the industry would do well to heed the Conway-Duffield push into Web services. Managers who can grow sales and profits at a time when so many competitors helplessly watched business dry up are worth following closely. Web Services Journal Industry Newsletter will be keeping an eagle eye on PeopleSoft as it expands into the global enterprise software marketplace next year…taking the fast-proliferating Web services paradigm with it into, especially, Asia.

PeopleSoft, Inc., has now exceeded analysts’ expectations for eight consecutive quarters, culminating in record quarters reported this year for both sales and earnings.

Rivals Oracle, SAP, and Siebel Systems had better start watching out!