Speaking at the company's 2003 Leadership Summit in Sydney Australia, Conway said the state of the global economy makes it imperative for business to control IT costs and advocated Linux-based server-centric operating environments for enterprise applications as one way to achieve this goal.
"The answer to the death grip Microsoft has on the industry is an alternative operating system," he told an audience of over 200 customers and partners. "That's why PeopleSoft has decided to port all our applications to Linux," adding that the OS now enjoys sufficiently broad support to be ready for mission-critical applications.
This decision, he said, positions PeopleSoft as " ... pro-choice, not anti-Microsoft".
Conway then added that, in his opinion, Microsoft's .NET strategy will not help business to control the costs of their enterprise applications, as it assumes code will be executed by PCs.
"Running enterprise software on a PC is a known bad thing. It's like asbestos," he said. ".NET is a home formula to make your own asbestos. PeopleSoft is absolutely convinced enterprise software should not be resident on PCs".
Conway also called for the elimination of middleware, categorising it as it as an investment business makes grudgingly and which consumes budget better spent on new infrastructure capable of boosting the bottom line. Conway described PeopleSoft's built-in integration with rivals SAP and Oracle as his alternative to middleware, then went on to describe leading middleware vendor BEA as a happy PeopleSoft customer.
The rest of Conway's speech focussed on PeopleSoft's intention to focus on the customer experience by delivering enterprise applications that are easier to deploy and cheaper to own than previous technologies. "Every industry matures to the point where it focuses on the customer experience," he said, adding that the company has tasked 500 developers with ensuring the next releases of its products offer rapid installation and simple customisation to reduce the cost of acquiring and operating enterprise applications.
