Oracle's Hostile Takeover Bid For PeopleSoft

rkuris writes "Oracle has launched a 5.1 billion dollar cash hostle takeover bid against Peoplesoft. PeopleSoft's CEO Craig Conway (a former top executive for Oracle) called Oracle's offer 'atrociously bad behavior from a company with a history of atrociously bad behavior.' 'Obviously it is a transparent attempt to disrupt the [1.7 billion dollar friendly] acquisition of J.D. Edwards by PeopleSoft announced earlier this week.' The week's events have reopened old wounds between the companies, which have a history of hostility and name calling."

Some bad, some bad

[Sean80]

Bad - I can't imagine it's a whole lot of fun working for Peoplesoft right at the moment. From what I've read, Oracle would lay off a large number of their employees. Given the state of the jobs market in Silicon Valley, and the fact that an entire company will disappear, with all of its associated technologies, processes, and so forth, what will the people there do?

Bad - I don't know about you, but I was pretty pissed off when AT&T sold their cable unit to Comcast. I got a call one Saturday morning from some company that I have never personally signed up with, offering to change my channel selection for me. Imagine paying a few hundred thousand dollars after having chosen Peoplesoft, only to have Oracle call you up one day, and say, 'hey, you're our new customer!'

Good - I suppose this'll be good for Oracle, and maybe, at the end of the day, customers will win because of the integration of two not-too-bad software suites.

Re:if I had PeopleSoft stock

[tupshin]

I'm assuming you misspelled zealot, and I'm also assuming you're an idiot. Why would you sell it to Oracle (for $16/share) when you could sell it on the open market for more (almost $18/share right now)?

It seems obvious that this offer was designed to intimidate PeopleSoft, disrupt the JD Edwards acquisition, and cast doubt on the future of PeopleSoft's products so that customer's would be less likely to buy.

Oracle is the good guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is one of the BIG supporters of Linux. They are now running their own operations on Linux and are in the process of converting their customers to Linux. Oracle is the good guy in this fight. They are a good friend to Linux and deserve our support. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Remember, the IT world is a shark tank -- it's eat or be eaten. Someone's going to be doing the eating, and it is better Oracle than [ name of comany in Redmond omitted ].

What exactly *IS* a hostile takeover anyways?

[mark-t]

For those of us who are clueless about this sort of thing, would someone care to enlighten the masses?

Sounds like... (mildly OT)

[nounderscores]

The Roman Takeover of Gaul

Read the pricewaterhouse coopers analysis [pwc.com]

and this other commentary [endlessrealms.com]

____________________________________
The Spiders are coming [e-sheep.com]

How would this affect linux?

[stefanlasiewski]

How would the Oracle purchase of Peoplesoft affect Linux? Oracle has been pushing Linux for a while. Peoplesoft is mostly installed on Windows (apparently Peoplesoft has pretty spotty support for Linux & Solaris).

A number of large businesses and private and public universities in the SF Bay Area have been installing Peoplesoft. The name "Peoplesoft" keeps coming up in discussions, and is usually accompanied by some cussing by the people who use it.

IIRC, UC Berkeley and Cal State Hayward are both moving from their inhouse solutions to Peoplesoft for the student record database (Causing many headaches among the students and staff). I've talked to some Unix admins at both places who griping about having to learn Windows and Peoplesoft.

These Universities are cutting budgets, but are still spending money on hardware, Windows licences, staff, training, training, and more training to accomodate the new Peoplesoft solution. The HR dept says this will save them lots of money.

But if Oracle takes ownership of Peoplesoft, will we see more Linux support in the future?

Re:$5.1bn ?

[Sean80]

Well, I wouldn't say -irrelevant-. The day your data center goes down in flames, and your db admin spills beer on your backup tapes is the day you remember why you spent so much money on the database - its enterprise features.

Would Reduce Our Choices By One

[Jackson]

Faced with the need for an ERP program, traditionally you could hire some programmers, wait a couple of years for them to create the software, and see if it worked, or was a big disaster.

Or, you could purchase from Oracle, Peoplesoft. Datatel, SCT, etc, gamble a lot of money, maybe discover you have to change your business processes to fit the software, and in a couple of years you may be .... kind of up and running.

I worry that if Oracle buys Peoplesoft, we lose a choice, such as it is. It's already a complex dynamic, and this may make the choices a bit more narrow.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Some bad, some bad

[JanneM]

Umm, the register isn't exactly a Paragon of Truthful Virtue, you know. In a sense, they're a perfect representative of British news - the picture isn't exactlty fake, and the facts aren't technically wrong, but you inevitably come away with an impression of the events that has very little to do with what actually happened.

Re:Oracle is the good guy

[aralin]

Well, if you are talking about the community contributions, Oracle is heavily pushing clustering support for Linux. They are doing everything possible to make Linux clusters a perfect replacement of your big unix iron. The linux porting group in Oracle is growing way too fast and quite a lot of their work is on the kernel and libraries and is GPL'ed and contributed back to community either directly or in form of patches available on Oracle web. I'd say IBM is doing more to help Linux, but I am not sure about Sun. Really.

Besides, Ellison hates Gates. Its personal. So his support of Linux is very Slashdot-like. :)

Consolidation of bad software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle, the DB, is fine, but that's not the part that competes with PeopleSoft. That would be Oracle, the business application suite [oracle.com].

At two previous jobs I used PeopleSoft's suite and found it lacking. At one I did a bit of reverse engineering on the database, and I had perl scripts generating better reports than their $x million software, which also crashed daily. (Nobody seemed to know exactly what x was, but afaict everybody who had to do with the decision to use PeopleSoft no longer worked there. Which might tell you something.) Oh, and for all the article's 'PeopleSoft is (used to be) a caring company' lines, I can assure you that once they have your money they don't care the slightest about their customers, even when you're still paying for service.

On the other hand, during that same period, I talked to a number of people about Oracle's suite (Oracle E-Business Suite, OEBS) as a potential replacement. There are lots of sites talking about all the money and time people save using OEBS, just as there are for PeopleSoft. But every person I actually talked to said, essentially, that it was crap and they regretted it, but don't tell anyone.

So, I guess my point is that both of them are basically crap software that got their reputation because no public company would ever admit to their shareholders that their well-researched software decision was a multi-million dollar disaster. So they deserve each other.

And on that note, I think I'm going to post this anonymously, since even though it's all true libel suites are time consuming.

Re:$5.1bn ?

[Kunta Kinte]

If Microsoft had any sense they'd sell the biz apps. The DB is irrelevant -- it's the schemas that people buy.

They do http://microsoft.com/BusinessSolutions/ [microsoft.com]

Microsoft just got in the CRM market recently, which had PeopleSoft really pissed. I believed they made a statement concerning pushing other platforms or something.

To be honest, I have to say, I'm with Microsoft on this one. CRM/ERP companies have been charging whatever they feel like for software and training for a while now. Companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are now commoditizing that market, and maybe we will start getting CRMs with price under $300/user soon.

Re:Oracle is the good guy

[yintercept]

Oracle is supporting Linux because their customers were installing Linux servers big time and Oracle wanted in on the action. Oracle's whole claim to fame had been that their software runs on many different platforms. Programs written for Oracle on Solaris run on NT, Unix, etc.. The business plan requires porting to any major new OS.

As for Microsoft bashing, the one reason I like Microsoft is because I know that if Oracle had the PC monopoly, things would be much, much worse. The reaon Oracle hates MS isn't because MS has a monopoly in the desktop OS, it is because MS ruined the nice little monopolies that the heavyweight database engines and mainframes had been working to perfect.

Re:What exactly *IS* a hostile takeover anyways?

[nelsonal]

There was an old game called Wall Street Raider that let you do all the things that were so popular in the 80s. It was pretty fun, but too easy to beat the computer if you fudged a little on the ethics and traded on your inside knowledge. I think Greenmail refers only to the payoffs companys make to the potential takeover artist, to basically go away. The above market price offer is called a Tender offer. Oracle's offer is exceedingly low for a hostile bid, most of these require at least a 25% premium, since the entrenched management has several advantages in getting the shareholders to approve the merger. The hosile bid, usually only has a high price. This seems like a way to screw with Peoplesoft's recently announced non-hostile takeover offer for JD Edwards.

Re:Hopefully this will go through.

[pyr0]

Interesting you mention that. The University of Missouri system recently converted everything to peoplesoft, and so far I've heard nothing but four-letter words and other complaints uttered in the same breath as the word Peoplesoft (I'm a student at the Rolla campus). From what I've heard, there have been several lawsuits against Peoplesoft from various customers, yet we still moved everything to that knowing there have been problems. [offtopic]All I can do now is laugh about this...I hope Oracle does take them over and terminate their products. It'd be fitting justice against the university administrators that have wasted money and blown the budget so bad that there was even talk of cutting one of the four campuses a while back, and now they are raising student fees by almost 20% starting in the fall semester. I'm glad I'm getting out of here in a couple of months. [/offtopic]

Re:Some bad, some bad

[man2525]

Imagine paying a few hundred thousand dollars after having chosen Peoplesoft, only to have Oracle call you up one day, and say, 'hey, you're our new customer!'

Few hundred thousand? Talk about getting off light. We have a PeopleSoft implementation at our university that cost millions of dollars. Oracle has said that they will support existing PeopleSoft implementations but that they would kill PeopleSoft's product line. Fine by me. The education product line is a contorted piece of crap that is obviously HR software. Students have Employee IDs, their majors are Career Plans, and they have Program Actions. On top of that, seeing 6 figure consultants who fly to France on the weekends to get haircuts and buy cookware lose marketable job skills will make my day.