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PeopleSoft Deflects Oracle Takeover, So Far 153

Posted by timothy from the ask-again-later dept.
SuperDuG send a link to this Reuters report on the Oracle's takeover bid for PeopleSoft, specifically questioning Oracle's committment to PeopleSoft. SuperDuG writes: "A letter from CEO Craig Conway states 'Five days following our announcement we learned of a hostile bid by Oracle Corperation to acquire PeopleSoft. Incredibly, Oracle made it clear their intention was to discontinue all PeopleSoft products, ultimately forcing customers to convert to Oracle's application and database.' Seems the dirt is being slung by both sides and the SEC is about to takeover and decide if this is even legal under anti-trust laws."
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PeopleSoft Deflects Oracle Takeover, So Far More

PeopleSoft Deflects Oracle Takeover, So Far

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  • did anyone else.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jeffy124 ( 453342 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @06:23PM (#6430130) Homepage Journal
    ... think of that scene from the Simpsons where Bill Gates offers to buyout Homer's Internet business? "Buy 'em out boys!"

  • This Is a Surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Hasler ( 414242 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @06:26PM (#6430153) Homepage
    > Oracle made it clear their intention was to
    > discontinue all PeopleSoft products, ultimately
    > forcing customers to convert to Oracle's
    > application and database.

    The only unusual thing about this is that Oracle has admitted it in advance. The more common practice is to tell reassuring lies about continuing support for existing products.

    • Re:This Is a Surprise? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Blikank ( 681383 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @06:29PM (#6430171)
      Actually quite the opposite is true. Oracle states that it will continue support of People Soft products for the next 10 years. (Version 8)
      • Actually quite the opposite is true. Oracle states that it will continue support of People Soft products for the next 10 years. (Version 8)

        Larry didn't state that in the beginning. Damage control doesn't count.

        rd

      • Re:This Is a Surprise? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Kefabi ( 178403 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @07:35PM (#6430463) Journal
        He has also said that Oracle while they will still support PeopleSoft's current products, they won't be continuing PeopleSoft's line of products.

        Any new features will only be in Oracle's own products. If customers want new features in their software, then they have to switch to Oracle.

        Considering that many of PeopleSoft's customers ask for new features, and PeopleSoft generally tries to please their customers, I wouldn't really call Oracle's "support" the equivalent of PeopleSoft's support.
      • mmm... those lies are quite reassuring!
      • In the ERP market, 10 years is a blink of an eye. Many companies take more than a year just to get the software installed and working. I would not be very comfortable if I was a peoplesoft customer and oracle did support my software properly for only ten years. I would still be forced to upgrade to oracle or change vendors unless I planned to go out of business within that timeframe.

    • Re:This Is a Surprise? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jmauro ( 32523 )
      If you've ever used PeopleSoft you'd know the only thing that would reassure you is that you'd never have to use it ever again. Now Oracle is making sure you NEVER have to use it again and everyone should be estatic.
      • Dude, my shitty school [csufresno.edu] decided to PS throughout their whole system. Everything from student records, financial aid, class schedules...

        What a monstrous POS, man. I can't describe the headaches this caused for the first year. Even now, the system is unbelievably slow, bloated, and cumbersome to navigate. Pure crap.

        • My school did the same thing. Spent millions of dollars moving everything to PeopleSoft just so they could have "on-line" enrollment. Which is sad, because what they call "on-line" still causes me to have to generate paperwork off-line and go through the same troubles I had before. For what's changed they could of added a Web Interface to the old enrollment system and it would of been just fine.
      • If you've ever used PeopleSoft you'd know the only thing that would reassure you is that you'd never have to use it ever again. Now Oracle is making sure you NEVER have to use it again and everyone should be estatic.

        ...ecstatic until you try Oracle's eBusiness Suite. Oracle seriously needs to hire somebody who has an inkling of how to do UI design.

      • Really? How many people did you have to employ just to apply patches to the product? I've not heard of PeopleSoft or SAP having, despite their complexities, the level of brokenness we've discovered in Oracle Apps. The GUI is awful but the backend is worse.

        Although I'm personally partial to Informix, the Oracle database is a good product and Oracle should have stuck to it's knitting and left application development to their business partners. They'd be more focused on the flagship product and not undermine

  • Competition is good but.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @06:29PM (#6430167) Homepage Journal

    Well, this is disturbing on one level due to the lack of competition if Peoplesoft were absorbed by Oracle, and yet I find myself not being too concerned due to the overwhelming costs and grief that Peoplesoft software has put certain organizations I know of through. Yes, I realize it is complex software, but I felt as if we were actually beta testing Peoplesoft code for them when we implemented it. Soooo, perhaps things might actually turn out for the better?

    • If it were not for all of these stupid (yes STUPID) Sherman Anti-Trust laws this would not be an issue to begin with. Anti-Trust created the conglomerate ad Oracle is just a conglomerate emulation.
      • But which would you rather have, multiple huge corporations competing in different sectors of the economy, or multiple huge corporations, each owning a different sector of the economy? Going back to the pre-anti-trust law days is hardly the best way to benefit the consumer...
        • A perfect example was oil.

          All of the Texas/Oklahoma firms sprang up without a peep from Getty and nobody in the government was making Getty leave them alone at that point.

          I prefer no-anti-trust thank you.
          • A better example is Ma Bell - the growth of services and plummeting of costs since the AT&T breakup has been astounding. When Ma Bell had the market cornered, there was no pressure to innovate.

            Frankly, I think we need stronger anti-trust action...
            • Try a another example. Yours fits not.

              "Ma Bell" was a publically regulated monopoly who REQUESTED, on it's own accord, to no longer be so. It is not an example of a firm that got giant all o it's own then "needed" to be chopped up.

            • Re:Competition is good but.... (Score:4, Interesting)

              by stanwirth ( 621074 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @10:50PM (#6431423)

              A better example is Ma Bell - the growth of services and plummeting of costs since the AT&T breakup has been astounding. When Ma Bell had the market cornered, there was no pressure to innovate. Frankly, I think we need stronger anti-trust action..

              I agree with your first premise--that growth of services and plummeting of costs has taken place since the AT&T breakup--and your conclusion--that we need stronger anti-trust action.

              However, I disagree with your second premise that Ma Bell had no pressure to innovate when they had the market cornered.

              Bell Labs in the 60's, 70's and 80's was (IMHO) a national treasure of research and development. True, their pressure to innovate did not come from commercial competition driven by next quarter's bottom line. It came rather from a more academic competition for research funds, both internal and external. All those EE PhD's who did not go get academic jobs were out there proving that their R&D was better than what could be done at a university. It was actually more desirable, from a researcher's standpoint, to go be a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs than to be, say, a full professor in the same subject at a small teaching college. Why? First, you got all the good toys, and contact with all the people developing all the latest greatest stuff--particularly access to internal technical memoranda. The best developments were kept in-house, and yet you could publish, and get bonus points for developing a rock-solid working prototype rather than being punished for the time you spent exploring the reliability issues rather than zooming on the next "sexy" fashionable idea! Bell Labs was considered "the best of both worlds" in that sense!

              The setup was geared to R&D, a higher level of R&D than you could do at a University, in part because of access to your colleagues proprietary unpublished R&D, and second because you could do projects that did not have to result in a stream of "LPU's" -- Least Publishable Units -- and grant money next year .

              At Bell Labs, by contrast, you could actually do a project with a tangible result projected for 5 years down the line, rather than having to limit yourself to doing something you knew would work in 1 or 2 (typically incremental mods on your PhD thesis, which is all most academic researchers ever do). And yet, the setup was incredibly academic, in that you had postdocs going back and forth transparently between the best research universities in the world, and Bell Labs. The result was a highly creative and productive R&D environment.

              One of the reasons Ma Bell's services were so costly at that time was because they were supporting this R&D infrastructure.

              Now my impression is colored by knowing a dozen or so people who were members of the technical staff and/or postdocs in "the glory days" of Bell Labs. There might be some people that considered it the WORST of both worlds. If so, I never met 'em.

              In national power grids and telephone networks, a regulated monopoly makes some sense, as you really do need different parts of the system to work well together. Even where there are standards and protocols established by disinterested parties, every implementation will be slightly different wherever an ambiguity or lack of specificity is present in the protocol or standard. Witnesseth Oracle's interpretation of SQL standards, to bring us back to the original topic.

              The reason I would personally lament the purchase of PeopleSoft by Oracle is that Oracle would use it to progressively stamp out OS/400 and most likely the PPC64 architecture altogether by interfering with the existing technical synergy among JDE, SAP, PeopleSoft, DB2 and a whole host of third party tools which run really stably and reliably on the iSeries platform. This is what makes Oracle's bid to purchase PeopleSoft anti-competetive in a very specific, measurable and identifiab

      • Agreed.

        I would love to pay $9 a gallon for gas from standard oil. Wouldn't you?

        • You might love to and you might think that's how it works, but it doesnt.
        • BTW, if you are under the impression that the breakup of Getty's corporation increased competition in any way then you are not too familiar with the situation.

          One massive corporation was divided into 36 (or so) and having all of the original owners owning the same percentages of the smaller firms, i.e., Getty still owned the same percentage of Esso and all the others after they were created.

          Quite the opposite of what happened with the Bell system where shareholders were forced to choose one company or ano
    • Well, this is disturbing on one level due to the lack of competition if Peoplesoft were absorbed by Oracle, and yet I find myself not being too concerned due to the overwhelming costs and grief that Peoplesoft software has put certain organizations I know of through. Yes, I realize it is complex software, but I felt as if we were actually beta testing Peoplesoft code for them when we implemented it. Soooo, perhaps things might actually turn out for the better?

      You think it was better putting Oracle 11i
    • and yet I find myself not being too concerned due to the overwhelming costs and grief that Peoplesoft software has put certain organizations I know of through. Yes, I realize it is complex software, but I felt as if we were actually beta testing Peoplesoft code for them when we implemented it Don't know much about Oracle do ya. Every Oracle ERP endevour has been a disaster.
    • I agree. My experience with PeopleSoft products has been nothing but awful. I understand that they get the job done, and I don't really know what the end user experience is like, but what I do know is that supporting them is terrible. Half of any PeopleSoft install must be done by hand, including insane things like editing environment variables in NT. Sure this can be done by a batch file, but why not make a real installer? Granted, all my experience with PeopleSoft was when I worked with a government
      • Not to mention they tend to depend on Oracle anyway, so this takeover actually makes sense.

        Actually, development for psoft is done on SQL Server, not on Oracle, and PSoft does support a range of databases.

        Oracle on the other hand only runs on oracle, which is why so many customers are opposed to this takeover.
      • "My experience with PeopleSoft products has been nothing but awful. I understand that they get the job done, and I don't really know what the end user experience is like, but what I do know is that supporting them is terrible."

        Wasn't the online course selection and billing system used by the Univ. of Waterloo made by peoplesoft? I have heard some harrowing tales about that system from students who defected to my own university. (Mind you, our system is pretty stupid too, but not nearly as bad as what I h

  • That's good... (Score:3, Informative)

    by gmaestro ( 316742 ) <jason.guidry@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Sunday July 13, 2003 @06:32PM (#6430183)
    ...because I think Oracle has its hands full making sure that its own software works [indiatimes.com].
    • What're you talking about? Oracle is Unbreakable! You must have misread the article, that article said that Oracle was fixing problems in other databases from other companies that were also named Oracle.
      • What're you talking about? Oracle is Unbreakable! You must have misread the article, that article said that Oracle was fixing problems in other databases from other companies that were also named Oracle.

        And, as usual, Larry was blaming it on custom code.

        rd
      • I've been a DBA, specially Oracle for the past 6 years. During that time, i've supported dozens of small/medium/large/very large databases with countless applications accessing them. In my experience when Oracle crashed (which was rare) it was because: 1. User Error 2. Hardware Issues 3. Application Issues I honestly, can't remember the last time Oracle crashed on me because of a database specific issue. The problem is, users love to point blame on the database. I get calls almost everyday starting li
  • Peoplesoft who?

    didn't orgs switch to SAP when they went Linux?

  • Like winning the lottery... (Score:3, Informative)

    by n0nsensical ( 633430 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @06:38PM (#6430199)
    From a June 3rd San Francisco Examiner article: [examiner.com]
    Running the combined company will be left to PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway, who recently came under fire for taking $14.6 million in restricted stock, as well as a large package of stock options, last year while the company's sales suffered.

    PeopleSoft estimated the 4.1 million stock options awarded Conway will be worth between $67 million and $171 million, depending on how the company's shares perform through November 2012.

    From today's Reuter's article:
    a $6.3 billion hostile takeover bid from Oracle Corp

    If I were Craig Conway, I certainly wouldn't mind this.

  • Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Oracle (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 13, 2003 @06:38PM (#6430201)
    Is it just me, or has this more or less backfired in a decently big way for Oracle?

    Not in a PR sense-- i think everyone kind of already views Oracle as the big-faceless-kind-of-evil corporation archetype. People don't use Oracle because they like Oracle, they use it because it works. Oracle isn't losing any business there.

    I just mean in the sense that they have succeeded in none of their goals, yet dumped an absolutely inordinate amount of attention on peoplesoft. I mean, seriously-- who here had heard of PeopleSoft before this whole takeover thing started? Certainly not me. Now, they've gotten a pretty decent amount of free advertising, and while the big media outlets didn't pay too much attention to this, the sites mostly read by those who are likely to be influencing buying decisions on databases or CRM products-- sites like slashdot.org-- have covered this.

    I'm curious if there's anyone out there who hadn't heard of PeopleSoft before the oracle buyout attempt but, now that PeopleSoft has been brought to their attention, they are considering buying or deploying a PeopleSoft product.

    • Re:Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Ora (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FatherOfONe ( 515801 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @07:33PM (#6430448)
      Here is the scoop.

      Every major company that would consider PeopleSoft knows about them. If they don't then their I.T. shop should be let go.

      Next this has little to do with Oracle getting to buy PeopleSoft. Think about it. If you were a major company and you were going to evaluate what CRM package you wanted, you would look at the company that PeopleSoft just bought, and probably say "Why go with that, it will be discontinued when the PeopleSoft thing goes through." Well now if you are one of those shops and you want to consider PeopleSoft, you will have some serious doubt that it will be a dead product, once Oracle buys them. Now you will probably consider Oracles product.

      The way I see it either way Oracle wins. If they drag this thing out for a year or two the damage will be done to PeopleSoft, and Oracles CRM package will probably gain a few marketshares. If they do somehow manage to buy them (won't happen), then they will kill off one of their major competitors. If you ran Oracle would you do any different? Granted this is bad for customers but from Oracles standpoint it is great.

      My personal opinion is similar to the other poster, in that I say STAY AWAY FROM CRM PACKAGES!!!!! I can go in to more detail if you want, but they are a bloated mess.
      • Do you have any experience with any open source ones? I am curious if any of them are any good.
      • Is crm just hype?

        I have been out of IT for close to 3 years now and they seem to about bringing contacts and address books and supplier information closer to users. Why is such an expensive and bloated product needed? Maybe I do not get the instant performance gains but to save 1 minute a day for each employee is just not worth it.

        • In one sense CRM is more than just hype - it's an answer to a very real problem, which is that in many large organizations, customer information is spread across numerous poorly integrated systems, and companies desperately need a way to tie this information together.

          However, in my view, much of the time, CRM is the wrong answer to this problem. You won't ever get a CRM package to tie information together if you don't know where it is, but if you do know where it is, then creating a centralized data stor

      • My personal opinion is similar to the other poster, in that I say STAY AWAY FROM CRM PACKAGES!!!!! I can go in to more detail if you want, but they are a bloated mess.

        I heartily agree. In this economy, you can hire a team of competent programmers* to develop and maintain your own in-house solution for less money than it would cost to license something from a major vendor. The major cost savings is in the maintenance - your own programmers can update the software to fit your business needs on their regular salary; you don't have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an option added to a drop-down menu. Why depend on someone else for the software that runs your business?

        * Tip: don't hire stupid people with no experience. When this plan fails, that's usually why. General rule of thumb: if they prefer Windows, they don't know what they're doing.
        • General rule of thumb: if they prefer Windows, they don't know what they're doing.

          Correction: people who make blanket statements about operating systems don't know what they're doing. We call it "golden hammer" syndrome, when you pick (or exclude) a particular solution in advance, then adapt your requirements to suit the capability of the tool. OS zealotry and professional competence are mutually exclusive.

          A competent engineer looks at the big picture. It's not just about technology, it's about people. I

      • Re:Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Ora (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Joey Vegetables ( 686525 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @06:32AM (#6432904) Journal

        My personal opinion is similar to the other poster, in that I say STAY AWAY FROM CRM PACKAGES!!!!!

        My experience is that while CRM/ERP packages can work if you're willing to modify your business processes around them, they are horrendously difficult to customize and integrate with other systems, and if you need to do this, you're almost always better off rolling your own.

        If you need to do customization and integration, the amount of work that requires will far exceed the cost of simply building an internal data warehouse with a variety of custom, mostly Web-based and workflow-oriented, front ends, all accessing this same data backend, and all inherently integrated with each other for that reason.

        Also, the problem of vendor lock-in is enormously worse for any CRM/ERP package than for almost any other type of software. CRM and particularly ERP systems claim to be able to run your business for you. The reality is that you will end up altering your business to at least some extent to support your CRM solution, and if you want to change it, or even upgrade to the latest and greatest release which is incompatible with some of your customizations, then you're in for a very serious world of hurt.

        My recommended approach, which is not popular but which will yield the best results in most situations, is to analyze your needs, including integration with existing systems, write documentation and specs and so forth, do an internal estimate for the cost of building it yourself, including maintenance over say a 10 year period, and then talk to your friendly neighborhood ERP vendor. Make sure it is willing to expose all data so that you have a migration path if you choose to migrate (it usually won't be). Make sure it does not tie you into relationships with some proprietary software vendor you may not want to do business with (believe it or not ERP systems usually do support multiple database backends, so this one won't necessarily be a problem). And last but not least, make sure that the ERP vendor offers you something you can't do for yourself at the same or less cost. Typically, for all but the smallest businesses with no IT staff, it won't.

        The end result of this analysis is usually that it is faster, cheaper and better to build your own centralized data mart and then write departmental custom apps tying into it. This is especially true if you're willing to leverage Free Software projects like Apache, PostgreSQL, or Firebird DB to reduce development time and costs.

      • Interesting analysis, but I tend to think that SAP will be the big winner. They currently have something like 37% of the worldwide ERP market. The Oracle-PeopleSoft brawl may make both options look unstable and I'm sure SAP will capitalize on it.
    • I'd be mightily surprised, if there were any sales added from this whole mess. It's actually more surprising that Peoplesoft was able to do their normal amount of business this quarter. The organiziations that would be considering deploying this software could easily pay a consultant or employee to research all the competitors for a month, without adding too much to the final bill. The license, hardware, and customization costs would probably total 500k for a small job, and several million for a big job,

    • Re:Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Ora (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have heard of PeopleSoft before this. They advertised on television, and even here on Slashdot IIRC.

      Also... Are you mad? If a company is going through a hostile takeover... That's a good reason NOT to buy their products. If I were in the position of making the call, I definitely wouldn't. It's risky. Business doesn't like risk. People generally don't.
    • i think everyone kind of already views Oracle as the big-faceless-kind-of-evil corporation archetype

      The people who usually decide between Oracle and PeopleSoft are usually the type you would associate with "evil" and "faceless".

    • Actually, I think most people in IT know all about PeopleSoft, the question is who has heard of an on budget functional PeopleSoft implementation?

    • Re:Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Ora (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think you might be in the minority. Most people in the IT business probably at least know the name PeopleSoft, maybe not what they do.
    • "Not in a PR sense-- i think everyone kind of already views Oracle as the big-faceless-kind-of-evil corporation archetype."

      um. Who do you mean by 'everyone?' Do you actually mean 'everyone?' Most people have never heard of Oracle or Peoplesoft.

  • "Hello Mr. Ashcroft, my name is Larry Ellison. I'm the CEO of Oracle corporation. I'd just like to go ahead and let your antitrust division know that I plan on committing a violation of the antitrust law. You see we plan on buying out one of our competitors and discontinuing their entire product line so that their customers have to use ours. Dirty, anti-competitive and sneak, isn't it? Glad to hear you think so to."

    "I'd recommend that old boy David Boise, but he's a real fuck up ya know? First he can't ke
  • um yeah, real clever story there, why don't you post it another 12 times in the same thread....

    Idiots
  • Oh when will wed designers realize that Image text == tiny on high resolution screens !!! Yes as the saying goes "Web designers only care if it looks good they dont actualy read it"
  • Funny how ad placement works, with this story I get a Orcale ad.
  • If they are taken over! Wow, what are the odds on this horse coming in (Oracle succeding)? Have to be better than 20%? Might get myself some Peoplesoft software instead of a Lotto ticket this week.
    • Might get myself some Peoplesoft software instead of a Lotto ticket this week.

      Hate to rain on your parade, but Peoplesoft's software is just a tiny bit more expensive than a lottery ticket.

  • Peoplesoft poisoning the well? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @07:14PM (#6430350) Homepage
    I've never heard of this tactic before: the article says that Peoplesoft is promising to reimburse their customers for five times the costs of any products they buy, if they end up getting bought out. It seems like a very clever tactic, since it boosts sales and makes them vastly more expensive to buy out, without otherwise affecting their bottom line.

    Any idea if this is legal, or if Oracle would have to honor commitments like these?
    • That is a pretty sneaky tactic. I am not sure if there is any legality to it, but it might not matter.

      If they have made the claim, and they get bought out, if the company that buys them out doesn't pay the rebate you can bet that they will get sued class action style, which will cost money, bring bad PR, and so on. Even if no money is awarded, it could cost the buyer a lot of time and money.
    • Since a contract is being formed between PeopleSoft and their customers, (and I mean an honest to goodness contract, not some click-through agreement) it seems like there is no way for Oracle to avoid the obligation IF it were to buy PeopleSoft.

      IANAL, but I can't see anything illegal or non-binding about it. It is just an extreme guarantee.
    • But what does a tactic like this do to PS's current shareholders? They benefit from a takeover attempt, because it drives the value of their stock up. The management of the company has a fiduciary obligation to act in the best interest of shareholders; not of PS's customers, and certainly not of the executives themselves. "Poisoning the well" to prevent a takeover could very well lead to a lawsuit by shareholders.
    • There are a number of conditions which have to be met in order for this poison pill to be activiated. The key one in this case is their stipulation that support for their products must continue for 2 years.

      Oracle has said, however, that they will continue to support Peoplesofts existing applications for much longer than even Peoplesoft plans on supporting them.

      So, in a nutshell, it appears that this poison pill won't be effective and Peoplesoft is just trying to scare its customers.

  • It should be legal (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 )
    Since they are NOT the only 2 people marketing ERP software ( there are several other large players, such as SAP ) the SEC shouldnt be involved in this.

    Sure they may come in and cause grief, but i dont feel its under their jurisdiction in this case.

    Its just a matter of time before Oracle stops playing nice and just crushes the resistance for the merger. Id say by christmas it will get ugly if its not done by then.

    It only makes sence for them to own the largest user of their database product. And since th
    • This also has large impats to the CRM world where the battle between Siebel, PeopleSoft and Oracle is heating up.

      I certainly hope it does not happen.

  • The Database Company with delusions of ERP (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At some point, I hope data will become well known that shows Oracles endevors as an ERP company have been a dismal failure. Agilent is screwed because they bought into the Oracle lies ( or more probably, major Agilent players are makeing huge profits off of Oracle). Oracle is using Agilent as an example of what it can do, and Agilent is buisy spinning the data so Oracle looks like a success. They even layed off a bunch of critical employees to cover their financial ass after the Oracal ERP fiascal lost them
  • the SEC is about to takeover

    Hate to be pedantic, but I think it's Oracle who wants to takeover :-) ... whether they do depends on what happens when the SEC steps in, intervenes, launches a review ...
  • Incredibly, Oracle made it clear their intention was to discontinue all PeopleSoft products, ultimately forcing customers to convert to Oracle's application and database.

    A few days ago I saw the back cover of a trade mag (I forget which one) which was a full-page ad from Oracle stating that they wouldn't discontinue any PeopleSoft product now or in the future, that they would continue to support those products, and continue to maintain them. Of course, conversion to Oracle tools would be discounted.

    --Ro

  • ...in the meantime I just enjoy my coffee out of this PeopleSoft/Oracle-mug [schumacher.net] (bought it about a year ago on a fleamarket, don't know it's origins or anything)

  • I hope Oracle takes over! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AstroDrabb ( 534369 ) on Sunday July 13, 2003 @09:46PM (#6431166)
    The fortune 500 company I work as a programmer for just finished spending tens of millions on a PeopleSofts HR system and thier portal. Man what a kludge. We have several VERY big Solaris boxen driving the systems and they are stil sooo slow and buggy. The portal puts out THE most non-standards compliant HTML I have ever seen. The average HTML page size for the portal is over 150K! PeopleSoft announced that they are porting thier three layer internet archietecture to Linux which would allow you to run the web server, DB and app server on Linux. PeopleSoft has thier own app server that is not a J2EE app server, but is the "brains" of the PeopleSoft archietecture. I think that since Oracle is a big Linux player now, that they do not want the competition under Linux so Oracle wants to buy out PeopleSoft. I hope Oracle does because in my experience Oracel knows how to make some great, stable and secure software. IMO, Oracle's offering are far better then the what I have seen and used from PeopleSoft.

  • BusinessWeek back cover (Score:5, Informative)

    by andy1307 ( 656570 ) * on Sunday July 13, 2003 @10:33PM (#6431336)
    Oracle's ad on the back of BusinessWeek(which usually compares Oracle to DB2) has a promise by Oracle to continue supporting Peoplesoft products. This is the list of bullet points on the ad(i am summarizing some of the points and PS=peoplesoft) 1. We will not shutdown PeopleSoft products 2. You will not be forced to convert to Oracle E-Business suite applications 3. ..continue truly high quality, truly global customer service for peoplesoft product... 4. Extend support for PS products beyond the timeframe PS itself has committed to and into the next decade. 5. We will take no actions that reduce the functionality of your PS implementation. 6....will increase the value of your PS investment 7. If and only if you elect to do so, you may move to ORacle E-business suite via FREE module-for-module upgrades It ends by "Dont be a victim of scare tactics". The last para is interesting "Ask any customer from our RDB database acquisition from DEC. Nearly nine years later, we are still providing ...suppport...rdb customers"...
  • There's nothing new here. These are not the oracles you're looking for. Move on, find some real news.

  • A Lesson in Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hangtime ( 19526 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @12:30AM (#6431887) Homepage
    Love him or hate him, you have to admire Ellison and what this has done to the entire ERP landscape at the moment by basically putting everyone outside of Oracle and SAP in-play. One of the frequent mistakes of corporate strategy is the internalization of decisions. Long before Peoplesoft and J.D. Edwards began talks, Oracle executives including Ellison got together and diagrammed a number of different scenarios occurring in the ERP sector and scripted the responses Oracle would take in the event of their occurrence. One of those events was Peoplesoft merging with J.D. Edwards thus why it was such a short time between the announcement by Peoplesoft and JD Edwards and Oracle's response. The entire situation was scripted!

    The real loser right now is not Peoplesoft, Peoplesoft is fighting for its life. The real loser and I believe the intended target of this attack all along has been JD Edwards. While Peoplesoft is a much more powerful competitor to Oracle, the overlap between the two in terms of customer bases is much smaller then between JD Edwards and Oracle. JD Edwards and Oracle go after almost the same manufacturing customers. Right now, JD Edwards, its customers, and future customers are withering on the vine due to this play. While I may still go ahead with a Peoplesoft purchase given the guarantee Peoplesoft began writing in its contracts (an incredibly smart move by PSFT), I don't get that kind of assuarance with JD Edwards and therefore more likely to go elsewhere.

    When the merger of Peoplesoft and JD Edwards was announced both companies were myopic of the environment and only thinking of what would occur together. Neither company had enough forsight to understand what their competitors might do or how the environment would shift around them. I have to hand it to Ellison and the Oracle execs (personally I'm not a fan of the culture or Ellison's bravado) but I do give them credit for thinking ahead and making a brilliant tactical move weakening two competitors at once. That said, everyone else will be on the lookout after such a bold attack by Oracle now that I would be very surprised if Oracle didn't go back to the drawing board and retool their scripts for the next time around.

  • Some background info (Score:5, Informative)

    by odin53 ( 207172 ) on Monday July 14, 2003 @03:37AM (#6432460)
    A couple short points. First, to correct the original post, the SEC is not the agency that handles antitrust matters. The FTC and the DOJ have joint power to enforce the Sherman and Clayton Acts.

    Second, currently, the Oracle/Peoplesoft combination is being reviewed by the DOJ. The DOJ has issued what's called a "Second Request", which is literally a second request for more information about the companies involved. In any merger that meets certain threshold requirements, the companies desiring to merge must file a notice with the feds under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (part of the antitrust laws). If the reviewing agency (the FTC and DOJ sometimes fight over the right to review certain transactions) is wary of the merger, they'll ask for some preliminary information; they'll try to get a better idea of what the market impact might be. (This is sometimes called a "Quick Look.") If there's a big impact, the reviewing agency will often make a "Second Request" for information in order to more precisely define the markets (or market) that the companies compete in. The Second Request is often a rather broad net that asks for a ton of primary source information -- people's email, drafts of documents, presentations, notes in notepads, even the stuff written on people's whiteboards in their offices!

    Once the reviewing agency gets all the info (when the companies certify that they have "substantially complied" with the second request), it has 30 days to sift through all of it and come up with a decision as to whether it will file suit to enjoin the merger.

    Oracle got its Second Request at the end of June (they're the only ones getting a formal review right now because of the hostile nature of Oracle's transaction). I don't think they've substantially complied yet, so this process may take a while.
  • The DOJ approved the PeopleSoft/JD Edwards merger. Officials of both companies expect to formally complete the merger later this week.

    Oracle claims they plan to aquire PeopleSoft even if the merger with JD Edwards is completed.

    Oracle still isn't offering much of a premium over the current Peoplesoft share price. Typically a hostile bidder will make an offer for around a 40% premium over the current share price. Until Oracle raises their bid to over $25/share they aren't really serious about buying Peoples

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