🧠 The Modern ERP Digest – Edition 23

Curated by Aaron Engelsrud | Published on PeopleSoftCloud.com

Aaron • Dec 24, 2025

🎄 This Week’s Focus

Before we get into this week’s stories, I want to start by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. This is the final edition of The Modern ERP Digest for 2025, and it feels fitting to close the year with both reflection and perspective.

2025 was a year of acceleration, recalibration, and maturity across ERP, cloud, and AI. Oracle pushed deeper into AI infrastructure, market narratives swung between optimism and skepticism, and PeopleSoft teams quietly continued doing what they do best: improving systems that run real work.

This final edition brings those threads together, including major AI initiatives, sober market analysis, and practical PeopleSoft guidance, to help frame where we’ve been and where 2026 is likely to head.

⚙️ Oracle, AI & Industry Signals

🔗 Oracle and the U.S. Department of Energy Collaborate to Accelerate AI Initiatives
https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-and-the-us-department-of-energy-collaborate-to-accelerate-ai-initiatives-2025-12-18/
Oracle announced a collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy to advance AI research and infrastructure. This partnership reinforces Oracle’s positioning not just as an enterprise vendor, but as a foundational player in national-scale AI initiatives.

🔗 TikTok Signs Deal to Sell U.S. Unit to American Investors Including Oracle
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/tiktok-signs-deal-to-sell-u-s-unit-to-american-investors-including-oracle-and-silver-lake
Oracle’s role in the TikTok U.S. deal highlights how deeply the company is embedded in high-stakes conversations about data governance and cloud infrastructure. This isn’t about social media; it’s about trust, compliance, and scale.

🔗 How Oracle Became a Poster Child for AI Bubble Fears (Yahoo Finance)
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-oracle-became-a-poster-child-for-ai-bubble-fears-150039511.html
A more critical take on Oracle’s aggressive AI narrative, this piece captures investor anxiety around valuation, capital spend, and hype cycles. It’s a useful counterbalance to the bullish headlines, and a reminder that execution always matters more than ambition.

🔗 Workday Is Not an ERP Solution—and That’s an Issue (Oracle Modern Finance Blog)
https://blogs.oracle.com/modernfinance/workday-is-not-an-erp-solution-and-thats-an-issue
Oracle makes a clear distinction between systems of engagement and true ERP platforms. The article argues that finance, supply chain, and operations still require deeply integrated systems, something many “modern” tools were never designed to be.

👩‍💻 PeopleSoft Community & Practice

🔗 Branding System Options for Fluid (JSMPros)
https://blog.jsmpros.com/2025/12/branding-system-options-for-fluid.html
A practical guide to branding PeopleSoft Fluid interfaces, covering themes, layout choices, and visual consistency. This is the kind of incremental UX work that makes PeopleSoft feel current without heavy customization.

🔗 5 Reasons to Upgrade PeopleTools
https://www.peoplesoftcloud.com/p/5-reasons-to-upgrade-peopletools
This article lays out a clear, pragmatic case for staying current on PeopleTools, including security posture, performance improvements, delivered functionality, and long-term flexibility. Upgrading isn’t about chasing features; it’s about maintaining leverage.

🔗 Wrapping Up 2025 for PeopleSoft Pros (PeopleSoft Insider)

Wrapping Up 2025 for PeopleSoft Pros

A reflective end-of-year post for the PeopleSoft community, touching on career growth, platform evolution, and the quiet resilience of PeopleSoft professionals. A fitting read as the year comes to a close.

🔗 Unlocking the Power of PeopleSoft Lifecycle Management and Customization Insights
https://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/unlocking-the-power-of-peoplesoft-life-cycle-management-and-customization-insights
Oracle highlights how Lifecycle Management and Customization Insights help teams understand their environments better, reduce risk, and modernize with intention. These tools are foundational for disciplined, data-driven PeopleSoft operations.

💬 Aaron’s Take

If there’s one theme that defined 2025, it’s this: the gap between hype and execution became impossible to ignore.

Oracle spent the year at the center of the AI conversation. Sometimes praised, sometimes questioned, but always relevant. Meanwhile, PeopleSoft teams focused on what actually works: better tooling, smarter upgrades, cleaner UX, and clearer insight into their environments.

That contrast matters. Big narratives come and go. Platforms that quietly deliver value year after year tend to outlast them.

As we head into 2026, the opportunity is clear. AI will keep evolving. Cloud architectures will keep shifting. But the organizations that win will be the ones that combine ambition with discipline, and curiosity with competence.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging with The Modern ERP Digest throughout 2025. I’m grateful for this community, and I’m excited about what we’ll build together next year.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2026.

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See you next year.

COMING IN 2026