Running PeopleSoft today is different than it was just five years ago. It is fundamentally different than running traditional on-premise software. Characterizing PeopleSoft as on-premise software is no longer accurate. You can run PeopleSoft anywhere—in a data center or in the Cloud—and today, you’ll get the most value when you run PeopleSoft in the Cloud.

This means more than simply shifting workloads to the Cloud and taking advantage of the elasticity of Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). PeopleSoft has invested significantly in its infrastructure and lifecycle management to automate environment provisioning and management.

Best Practices + Tools to Run Today’s PeopleSoft

There are a few features within PeopleSoft that can help customers improve the way they run PeopleSoft on-premises or help them move their PeopleSoft system to the Oracle Cloud. Some of these features include:

• Selective Adoption
• PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM)
• PeopleSoft Cloud Manager

Perhaps the most significant change that’s been made to modernize the PeopleSoft ownership experience is the introduction of Selective Adoption. PeopleSoft is constantly delivering new features, nearly every month. A new release, called an Update Image, is delivered with new features. Hundreds of new capabilities are delivered every year. More importantly, customers are adopting those features to deliver real value to their organizations. With Selective Adoption, customers can monitor what has been delivered and then update their environments based on the strategy that works best for them.

PeopleSoft Update Manager (PUM) gives you the ability to explore and select changes to adopt. From there, it will create a single package that is tailored to the specific target environment. It will account for object dependencies, PeopleTools releases, and more. It’s no longer unusual for PeopleSoft customers to be exploring and testing new capabilities just hours after delivery, deploying transformative updates to production within two or three months, or providing real-time feedback on updates or features and then receiving them a few months later.

Customers are also using the powerful new PeopleSoft Cloud Manager, which gives administrators the ability to move environments, create templates, and streamline patching. PeopleSoft Cloud Manager also makes self-service environments easy to use. With the click of a button, a PeopleSoft environment is ready in minutes with your configuration and data for any use—demo, development, or test.

Selective Adoption

To fully harness the power of Selective Adoption, customers need to evaluate some important changes of their own. It’s important to set a Selective Adoption strategy and think about when to apply updates, security fixes, tax updates, bug fixes, and new features.

Customers use a lot of different models and often evolve their model over time, investing in test automation. To respond to business demands and deploy updates often, automated tests are a necessity. This makes each update cycle faster, less expensive, and higher quality (i.e. reducing invasive customizations). You can eliminate the costly customizations that keep you from taking on innovation by adopting delivered product functionality, taking advantage of the many configuration tools available, or rewiring invasive customizations into a bolt-on with capabilities like event mapping.

This model introduces new technologies while changing the maintenance and feature adoption lifecycle, which often means you need to take a fresh look at how you monitor, evaluate and decide what to deploy. You may also need to decide if a collaboration between IT and the line of business is critical when you select the features that positively affect the users.

Regarding the Cloud, this model accelerates and amplifies the impact of a Selective Adoption strategy. It can help quickly deploy demo environments, enable project work streams that run in parallel with other updates or upgrades, provide quick and repeatable test environments, or drive the environment patching process itself.

This new approach is a transformative shift that will require some work, but the resulting impacts are well worth it. It allows businesses to deliver new value and innovations to their users faster, and it often comes with direct cost savings, immediately visible improvements, and a lower ongoing operational cost.

For more information on how to run today’s PeopleSoft with Selective Adoption and Cloud, check out the video below.