The coming shift to e-commerce.

While Y2K, upcoming presidential elections in several countries and economic uncertainties are major distractions for 1999, the coming year or two will see gradual but greater acceptance in Latin America of e-commerce. PeopleSoft, already known for its enterprise resource planning solutions (ERP), will be more than ready.

In Latin America, PeopleSoft is positioning itself as an applications provider for e-business with an aggressive campaign planned for next year, says Juan Jose Sobrino, PeopleSoft's manager of financial services for Latin America.

"The Internet is going to change the way we do business in Latin America," Sobrino explains. "But people need to have more experience and maturity with web culture. We're going to start thinking in a world where the rules are based on the Internet, and every employee in every company has to have Internet access and know how to make transactions over it."

Sobrino believes that a wariness of on-line commerce will fade over the next couple of years and that telecommunications infrastructure will improve dramatically.

PeopleSoft is a world leader in enterprise application software. Its applications for eBusiness are a set of integrated, Internet-based, employee facing self-service applications that combine strong integrated ERP business processing with buyside and sell-side eCommerce to support integrated end-to-end eBusiness processes. Additionally, through a set of advanced analytic applications, PeopleSoft delivers roles-based decision support to knowledge workers within the enterprise.

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is a comprehensive, integrated analytic business solution designed to increase the value of organizations by enabling people to make better decisions. PeopleSoft EPM will enable users to analyze transactional data from PeopleSoft enterprise applications along with other internal and external data sources to help improve customer satisfaction, optimize return on investment, reduce risk and maximize profitability at every level within their organization.

"For the financial services sector, this is known as a profitability management solution," Sobrino explains. "It' a set of analytical applications that give a particular view of profitability." The current software suite of four modules will grow to around a dozen modules by year's end.