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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."
I would sure as hell be selling it to Oracle.
how could anyone but a Zelot pass up that offer?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
All I know is they make a huge database program for the U.S. Coast Guard (where I work). It has to be the worst piece of crap software I have ever used. Hopefully Oracle is better.
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.
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 ].
For those of us who are clueless about this sort of thing, would someone care to enlighten the masses?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The Roman Takeover of Gaul
Read the pricewaterhouse coopers analysis
and this other commentary
____________________________________
The Spiders are coming
That's a bunch of money. I didn't realize Oracle was that rich. I don't know Oracle that much, but I thought they basically sold a sequel database on steroid, and did related services : can anybody inform me here ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You've never used JDEdwards World or One World...
Instead of looking at this acquisition from a purely rational, coldly analytical perspective, we should and must begin to look at the quality of the lives of the employees. I would prefer to work for an organization like PeopleSoft. It is an organization that cares.
Oracle is cut from the same cloth as Sun, Siebel, and Cisco. Brutal, cut-throat, survival of the fittest. Increasingly, with the influx of H-1B's and "free" trade, American companies are becoming the ruthless of ogres of the early part of the 20th century. Most of my American colleagues do not want an America where employees are savaged. We gladly accept a small reduction of economic expansion in exchange for a kindler and gentler American workplace and society.
It is this kindler and gentler America that has drawn tens of millions of immigrants to this country.
We shareholders should oppose this hostile takeover and send Larry Ellison back to the Orient that he so admires.
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?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Ain't Peoplesoft an ERP maker? Ain't SAP one of Oracle's most important client-bringers? Why do I fail to see that this makes any sense?
I've been wondering what this would mean for the MySQL/SAP deal announced a week or so ago.
To date SAP has wanted to be agnostic to the underlying database that their software runs on, so you could view the MySQL deal as a nice headline but not really something that was going to have SAP's salesforce pushing MySQL into enterprise customers.... They'd be just as happy if those customers ran Oracle as long as they ran SAP on top of it.
However, if Oracle owns PeopleSoft they suddenly become SAP's largest competitor. As soon as that happens a major SAP infrastructure provider is now the enemy, and SAP might suddenly have reason to push another solution vs. allowing the customer to choose. After the deal with MySQL that solution might well be MySQL.
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.
.... kind of up and running.
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
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.
It has been deception and greed that suckered immigrants into America... Most were exploited mercilessly, but hoped that their children would do better. It is the Myth of a kinder gentler America, a myth perpetuated by the aggressive ogres. We have already live in an America where employees are savaged, and it is getting worse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
When you offer your company for sale, you have only yourself to blame when someone makes a bid to buy it. And offering your company for sale is exactly what you're doing when you issue stock.
I have no sympathy for companies that want to be publicly traded corporations but then pretend that they're a private firm.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
... I saw an AC post this story here two days ago.
Actually, Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft reminds me a lot of heyday of dot com companies, when fights between friendly and hostile takeovers were quite common.
yes, they make the biggest, baddest and hardest to debug (grin) rdbms. if you don't know why they are so rich, give them a call and ask for a quote =]
paul
The problem with this quote is that it refers to the sales force.
As a developer in the server technologies division of Oracle, I'd have to say that I don't see the "intense competition" that is mentioned. Within my group of about 50-100 (that is, all of the people below the closest VP), there is a true spirit of cooperation. If I have a problem with a specific line of code or a new technology I am learning, there are many other people on the team who are willing to help (just as I am willing to help them), even if they are not working on the same project as me. I know it sounds idealistic, but that's what the real situation is in development.
This cooperation even extends to the H-1Bs, and all of the other recent immigrants with whom I work. I'm one of the few people in my group that was born in America and speaks English natively. However, I look at having this diversity in the group as a positive and not a negative as it brings different viewpoints to technical discussions and makes non-technical discussions a little more interesting.
Now, sometimes there is a level of competition between teams, as each team thinks it knows the best approach to a given problem. But that is healthy, and it forces a detailed refinement of the approaches so that the "higher ups" can make a decision regarding which approach is most appropriate.
So, I can't speak for the sales force, but I don't know if the development cultures are as different as the quote suggests.
"It was like Larry was driving by, spotted a really nice wedding in progress, crashed it with a shotgun and said, 'This bride's going to marry me at the end of a barrel,"' - Craig Conway, CEO of PeopleSoft from Reuters.
I find this interesting they dislike each other so much - don't most of PeopleSoft's big applications run on huge Oracle clusters anyway - something I'm sure Ellison doesn't mind at all.
--- We all brains, why not use them?
Oracle is cut from the same cloth as Sun, Siebel, and Cisco. Brutal, cut-throat, survival of the fittest. Increasingly, with the influx of H-1B's and "free" trade, American companies are becoming the ruthless of ogres of the early part of the 20th century....
Why does it always have to be "us versus them"?
How does one take a story about Oracle's CEO pushing to increase his company's market share and make it a war cry against "foreigners" and the assult on American values?
Truth is capitalism, is based on competition. And America was built on capitalism, in large part.
Globally, the US is one of the more agressive trading partners. Vigorously defending its National interest ( eg. Steel ) while pushing for open trade, trade with smaller countries that couldn't possibly compete due to economies of scale. But that's fine because business is not pretty.
If Oracle treats it's salesforce badly, over the long run, with competition, they will lose their good sales people and faulter.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
PeopleSoft runs mostly on Microsoft Servers. The thought of losing a potential revenue stream might cause Ballmer to dip into petty cash and settle this argument overnight. Oracle is not going to integrate PeopleSoft; they are buying a customer list and less competition, in addition to kicking a few more thousand geeks to the curb.
Microsoft could pick them up, keep them as a separate line of business, with management autonomy and shareholders would go for that in a heartbeat. This could turn out to be a very bad move by Oracle. If Microsoft so mch as raised an eyebrow, Oracle stock goes down, making the aquisition more expensive even if Microsoft doesnt play. I see a lot of ways that Oracle could end up regretting this big time.
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.
> Peoplesoft is mostly installed on Windows (apparently Peoplesoft has pretty spotty support for Linux & Solaris).
Yay, another slashbot who comments on something about which they know nothing.
To use the old version of Peoplesoft (Version 7 and below) you need to use windows client software.
The new version is web based, so any up to date client (IE, Moz, Opera, etc.) will do. Server side runs on Oracle (take your pick of OS) or MSSQL (one size fits all) for the DB with a Bea Tuxedo server (runs on NT, Solaris, AIX? don't know what else).
If Berlkey is dorking around with winblows clients then they're using the old client, probably due to licensing fees. I certainly wouldn't want to be rolling out the old software, thats for sure.
But axeing the custom piece of software in favor of COTS software should save them money, presuming they don't modify it so much it effectively becomes in-house...
Companies should always look for ways to be more and more efficient and productive. Doing that maximizes the benefit that a company contributes to the global economy. The key word here is global.
If you want companies that don't look at their bottom line you have a couple of options:
a) Start your own damn company and be nice to everybody. That's the beauty of capitalism.
b) And/or join the socialists or whatever they are called.
how do you say 5 in def leppard speak?
A PeopleSoft employee, and I can tell you that we aren't selling to Oracle.
Acquiring JD Edwards is going to make us #2 in the field, and Oracle #3, which is why Ellison wants to take us over, kill our product, and terminate all of our jobs.
Craig Conway (PeopleSoft CEO) has already told all of us that he won't let "Ellison kill PeopleSoft".
On top of all that, the offer made to PeopleSoft by Oracle per share is now lower than the price it's trading at. Take that into account, plus what the company will be worth after acquiring J.D. Edwards, and Oracle won't be able to convince the shareholders to go along with it.
Vonal Declosion
So if Oracle buys Corel with all its jinxed and hexed software (that they just leave somewhere, collecting dust) - who is acyually the hostile part in this? Oracle for being stupid enough to byu Corel, or Corel for being malicious enough to be sold to Oracle?
It is an organization quite likely to not survive.
Look at the statistics of number of employees laid off by Oracle and you will find that it is one of the lowest of any high tech industry in Bay area. In fact, they have slashed bonuses, frozen pay and allowed voluntary attrition rather than laying off people. HP was a good company in taking care of employees, but is no more. Don't know much about Siebel, Cisco or Peoplesoft.
From working with both companies owith their 'erp' applications, neither is anything to write home about.
.. eeek.
Both were poorly managed, *not* user friendly and had MAJOR cost over-runs. ( in our case in the millions of dollars, mainly due to overselling on their part that borderlined on fraud in oracles case ), not to mention techincal issues right and left.
Having them both under one roof
Disclaimer, oracle project was 5 years ago, they might have improved since then, but i doubt it )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One can quite easily do this when one's agenda is simply to denigrate America - it is done by choosing the loser in an event and making him out to have Bambi eyes, stalked and killed by the evil hunter.
I've used and managed an AS400 with JDE for the past 3.5 years.. and although I don't like the product I have respect for it..
And I've had dealings with Oracles management..
these guys do not fsck around.
They are a VERY driven, powerful bunch of people who get what they want, and get it because they ain't afraid of stepping on toes.
JDE needs to watch their step, cause these guys won't give up easily.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
You are SO talking apples and oranges here. Let's not even argue about the differences in features between MySQL and ANY enterprise-strength DB. SAP and Peoplesoft compete on applications, not the underlying DB. MySQL would bring absolutely nothing to the table (unless, of course, MySQL is really an industrial-strength CRM/ERP suite - yeah - totally sarcastic).
They acquired it by buying a German company (StarDivision)at a good price, and made a few improvements.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
on Mr. Ellison, and while you are at it, Mr. Gates.
There's more to life than survival
People-soft is absolutely horrible. They took over a bunch of stuff at my school for handing checking grades, signing up for classes, etc, and there's been nothing but complaints. Their system is absolutely horrible and has all kinds of annoying restrictions placed on it. There's nothing like 13,000 people trying to sign up for classes or grades at the same time, but only 50 people are allowed to log on at once! Maybe Oracle can fix up such a poor excuse for a company.
The software sucks, and no one would in their right minds want to see the source.
Not a good example to follow if you want an alternative ERP.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
If Oracle treats it's salesforce badly, over the long run, with competition, they will lose their good sales people and faulter.cough..Tom Siebel..cough
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I would try to count no-immigrants, but the rest of them all live in Indian reservations.
Well, I am glad that H1B stream is almost stopped (at first politically, only after - economically) and now the big business is outsourcing everything offshore. Now, people in India, China, Russia etc can appreciate America's kindness locally, with improvement of their local life without killing their personal culture (that what they would have to do otherwise in the cultureless country of fast food and TV).
It's a very good cold refreshing shower for stupid overpaid Americans. Your "safe" days are gone. Adapt to new millenium or die - that's what you used to suggest to third world, didn't you?
Less is more !
You're assuming that employee loyalty has no value. I work for a company that looks at the bottom line. They know that if they treat their employees like shit, the bottom line will fall out.
No One that I know wants to work for an Oracle-type company. What Oracle is doing isn't preserving the bottom line. It's giving Larry Ellison something to jerk off over when he thinks about the life-and-death hold he has over so many talented people.
Side note for Oracle style management:
If you treat employees like that, if you try to annihilate their careers if they don't win in the yearly June pit-bull fights, expect more than a few of them to decide they don't give a shit about your NDAs and Noncompetes.
You get what you give.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Don't feel sorry for PeopleSoft or its CEO. In my opinion there is little within the bounds of legality that Ellison or Oracle could do to him or to PeopleSoft (whose board chose to hire him) that would be so bad that it would be beyond a kind of karmic what-goes-around-comes-around kind of payback.
While i agree its a Looong time.. ones first impression of a companies attitude and product also linger for a long time..
It left a really bad taste in my mouth. Id have not been so upset if it wasnt for their attitude after we had issues.
Too bad peoplesoft ( current project ) doesnt taste much better.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Was it that kind old black lady who took over the humanity? Did I miss something there?
The reality is that Oracle and Peoplesoft have culturals as different as two companies can possibly be. Oracle is of the chewing them up and spit them out school. If Oracle has a soul, it is a very dark one. On the other hand, Peoplesoft has a soul and it is a soul which - how every imperfectly - trys to care for the employees while still calling forth the best from its employees.
If Oracle were to make this hostile bid come to fruition, the majority of Peoplesoft employees would be heading for the door as quickly as possible. The end result would be a pile of IP in Oracle's hands, but not any of the people that can take that IP and extend it and bring value from it.
Of course, the Larry Ellison isn't going to see it that way. Rather, he is seeing that I can take these two pieces and put them together and they will work the way that I anticipate. Why? Because everyone works the way he expects - or he gets rid of them, the list of folks that have bailed out of Oracle due to Larry is very long - and that is just the way it will work out in his world. He isn't going to think about culturally compatibility. But then again that is true of most CEOs trying to build empires. Why do you think that most mergers end up being failures?
You had best start looking anyways, regardless if the bid goes through or not the additional information the mass business public has gleaned on the purchase of JDE is going to severely tarnish PeopleSoft. You guys will now work REALLY hard to make sales because people are going to be iffy on your future. After the of JDE aquisition you won't be #2 for long if you are even are when the merger is completely done. Oracle has been really smart with this, it is win-win for them.
--- I do not moderate.
Calendaring, huh? Check out the site. I'd say "calendaring" is understating the case. If it was just a calendaring system, it might have a chance. Instead, it seems to be going for "everything to everyone".
There are some contractual things you can't get out of. You can't cancel existing contracts, which is the reason a "poison pill" defense sometimes works, and there are various contractual guarantees made to major investors that can create "classes" of shareholders (preferred, common, etc.), which makes it a little more complicated than just a question of percentages.
However, the answer to your question is mostly "yes". As 51% shareholder, you can typically completely replace the board of directors, because the board is elected by the shareholders (which means the owners) to represent their interests. New 51% owners usually want new representatives for their new interests, and the 49% owners can't raise the votes to stop them.
Then, since the CEO works for the board, the new board appoints a new CEO, who then replaces the senior execs, who all report to the CEO. They can then replace anyone below them who doesn't support the new regime.
I should add that the term "hostile takeover" is frequently just the viewpoint of the existing management. It's hostile to them because they may be thrown out by the new owners. It may not be hostile at all from the perspective of the existing small-scale shareholders -- the "outsiders".
Another possibility (in some cases) is that the old insiders club (the board and their pet CEO and his cronies) may have been milking the company for their own personal gain and there was nothing the small-scale shareholders could do about it. The big guys are making a pile of money off the company, while the company itself goes nowhere because it's being managed for the benefit of the top management, not the common shareholders.
Then a new team comes to town and offers a lot more money for common shares than the shareholders were going to get any other way. Whether the shareholders sell to the new guys or keep their now-higher-valued shares, the game has changed. Now, the old management tells everyone that the new guys are "hostile", but that may not be the way everyone sees it. They may end up more corrupt or incompetent than the old management, or they may be the first good thing for the common shareholders in years, but either way they'll be called "hostile" by the old management.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
"a) Start your own damn company and be nice to everybody. That's the beauty of capitalism."
I agree with you(ektor) 100%. It only costs $50 to start a corporation in Colorado. It may cost more or less in other states but not by much.
"We gladly accept a small reduction of economic expansion in exchange for a kindler and gentler American workplace and society."
If that's the case, start a corporation with the motto "Our first priority is kindler and gentler American workplace and society, not profits."
Since you(not ektor) believe that most of the Americans have same belief as you do, you shouldn't have problems finding investors. And even if your product costs more than your less friendly competitor, you can bet that the people will choose your product because most of them believes in your corporation's motto. I hereby put my Foolproof Idealist Business Plan(TM) on public domain so you don't have to pay me a cent if you become million/billionaire from it.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Dangit, where are mod points when I need them ... I don't know that this is a +5 comment but it's certainly worth more than the +1 it's at now as I write this ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
I work at J.D. Edwards and it was bad enough hearing that my employer asked to be bought out and that I may lose my job but to then hear Oracle's plans where I know I would lose my job - it sucks! The economy is doing bad enough as it is without Larry Ellison buying up companies and laying people off.
As with every story - ther are two sides... Conways was taught most of his charm whilst at Oracle...
Of course Oracle doesn't need massive layoffs. Look at their natural attrition rate--a few month hiring freeze accomplishes the same thing. It's because the culture is so brutal there. I know this because I worked there for 5+ years in the services division. Services is culturally somewhere between sales and development; generally more like sales.
p.s. Before everyone jumps in telling me what a bunch of morons work in Oracle Services, don't bother. I already know there were a lot of morons around--and they do get purged. Oracle is more capable than most companies of getting rid of people who don't cut it and aren't profitable.
Sun's original intentions were not to open the source. They had originally hoped to use it as an alternative to Microsoft Office, but that dream was quickly squashed. They did the next best thing (for which I am grateful).
Note that StarOffice, the full product, is not open source. It becomes open source (and integrated into Open Office) as features trickle into the public domain. Certain parts of StarOffice are tied up in IP restrictions. Fortunately they are not too important.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
My school recently converted to PS. I often rant about how the old TELNET-based system was about 10 times easier to use, even in plain old black and white, with only keyboard input. Most of my friends agree. It is a horrible horrible curse on end users.
I am simply astounded at their requirements for a web browser. They support IE 5.0, 5.5, or Netscape 4.7. That is *IT*. IE6? Nope. Netscape > 4.7? No can do. And the official reason from the school basically states that PeopleSoft has determined it's not of value to update their software for modern browsers. I can't help but wonder what egghead in the IT dept actually APPROVED a purchase of a million+ dollar system that doesn't even support modern browsers. This is for 40,000+ users!
I work part time at the help desk for this school and our solution for people using XP (which cannot downgrade IE) is to use netscape 4.7! What a horrible solution.
Actually 50% is not (strictly speaking) controlling interest. 50% +1 of voting shares is absolute control.
A controlling interest is a number of the VOTING shares that is enough to swing a vote in the direction you desire. That's why in most jurisdictions securities regulations require filing disclosures if you own >5% of the shares outstanding.
A controlling interest can be 30%, 20% 10% or even less.
It's governed by statistical models, probabilities and obviously the basic math. As long as another shareholder or group of shareholders does not have enough votes to control the direction the company, you have the controlling interest.
rkuris writes "Oracle has launched a 5.1 billion dollar cash hostle takeover bid against Peoplesoft.
I did not even realize PeopleSoft ran hostles, yet alone had 5.1 billion dollars worth of them!
Why analytical perspective is cold? Isn't the employee quality of life a rational issue? I praise your mindfulness, but you don't have to be wishy-washy. True rationality takes into account the Natural Law and its godly, human-care values.
Free movement of persons and merchandise (that is, free immigration & trade) is good for poor people in poor countries, who can then sell their wares, their labour and the produce from it anywwhere instead of being in eternal dependence from foreign aid. It is also good for consumers, with cheaper, more abundant, better quality goods. It is not good for the lazy youngsters of Europe and North America, who think that they are entitled to a nine-to-five attitude. The only alternative would be to Europe and North America stop selling their luxury goods, patents and copy rights elsewhere.
The ruthlesness of the modern culture has nothing to do with free trade, but with decadence and greed. Free trade is conductive to the common good of humankind.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
At the University of Louisville, the on-going switch to PeopleSoft has been on-going for years and looks to be on-going for many more years because little seems to work as it should. The product for education is awful.
The Web user interface is incredibly poorly thought out and slow. The system regularly disappears off the network.
Oracle couldn't be worse.
Most people put databases on a separate box behind a firewall. I can't believe anybody in their right mind would put a DB and a webserver on the same box. That's a serious design flaw, not to mention huge security risk.
For what it's worth, 5000 queries a sec should be no sweat for most databases.
At this point, neither JDE, Peoplesoft nor Oracle are offering enough employment opportunities to the IT sector to warrant much debate about their future. And "Yeah," I'm considering their install base, too (all that work has gone to the already over-worked, full-time IT monkeys).
... by the way, several years back Ed McVanney (JDE's old CEO) turned down an offer of 60+ bucks a share for JDE from Billy Gates (imagine that). I guess he still (stupidly) had faith in his product. I say "stupidly," because as a person who is supposed to be aware of such things, he ignored the cardinal rule of the computer industry (see above).
To me, it looks like M$ doesn't have to step in (re: "Waking the Giant"); all it has to do is sit by and watch the sharks tear up and savage each other -- there's no prey left, so what else do they have to eat? As INFOworld summed it up a few *YEARS* back -- The ERP sector underestimated resistance to innovation by the management personnel of mid-sized corporations in the Midwest. (I guess the boys couldn't show the "Show Me" states.)
Every day spent gnawing each other's guts over who's gonna be #2 or #3 is another day spent neglecting the real business of scrapping the ugly program templates and software architecture of an ERP industry that was never set up right to begin with. Any banker will tell you: marketing only goes so far; sooner or later you have got to have a decent product that exceeds the expectations of the customer.
Oh quitchyerbitchin!!! Everybody knows its true, if not quite practical, that what has been needed from the get-go has been an overhaul of ERP. That's why JDE was so great. Configurable Network Computing. (Huh? Well, I thought this was a tech website.)
Don't get me wrong. JDE is crap, too. But at least with JDE, if its broke (and it probably is out of the box), there's usually some way that local people on-site can finagle and develop a fix somehow. Add a few servers here, optimize a database there, patch some C++ here, a few stored procedures there; and voila!, a few environment mappings later, management can get back to the business of ignoring the crap that they just paid twenty million bucks for and concentrate on using it the 10 or 20% that they end up doing anyway. The problems were never corrected, per se; but bottlenecks were eased, irregularities were smoothed over, reports ran and got printed, settings didn't just disappear, etc.
You can work all the IT magic with Peoplesoft or Oracle that you want. But uhh ahh, the fix ain't happening. Not without a redesign. JDE can be redesigned on-site by non-PhD's, and most decent installations are (sic). Unless management insists otherwise (sic). That's the reason why Peoplesoft NEEDS JDE. Peoplesoft is about as easy to turn around as an ocean liner. And guess what, that's the reason why Oracle needs JDE, too; hence, the hostile bid for Peoplesoft. (Financial analysts are giving JDE either a strong buy or hold rating! Some valuable property there.)
But as with everything else about the perverse computer industry, it seems that the best stuff is the first to go belly up. Then what's left around stirs like the flushing contents of a too-well used toilet that never seems to go down
(i.e. the "Cardinal Rule of the Computer Industry").
Oh
Just about four months ago, McVanney was ousted from JDE. Now we know why! He was standing in the way of progress!!! BwwWWahhhAhhahhahhhahhahh.
My wife works for P&G who uses SAP and it stinks too. I have been using Oracle trash for ten years (mostly the database) and it is a primitive, loathsome accretion of old C with a none-too usable Java UI slapped on top for show( bet Larry likes that). The core of the product is so old and bug-riddled that Oracle can't even provide meaningful customer service because there are only a handful of people there that knows how much of it works and none of them work in the customer support division.
Why do you think that reducing the number of competitors in this field is likely to produce a better product (because the Oracle product ain't)? I think it will simply create more software development positions in India and fewer in Pleasanton. What we really need is a real contender of an open-source DBMS that will pull the plug on Larry's big cash machine, tax incentives to companies that employ in the US and huge disincentives to those who don't and more intelligent (vs just plain scared) investors who will invest in real business opportunites (unlike the fools who have pissed away the wealth of an entire generation on e-commerce).
:-)
While Sun may be doing The Right Thing, it doesn't make them philanthropists. You should support Sun for such actions, but not forget that company exists for its shareholders. Right now, our motives are colinear.
My advice: keep it that way.
Again, nothing is bad about stuff being NOT open source, but don't think that Sun is just giving stuff away because they feel generous. There are other reasons as well (besides not wanting to be seen as tightwads).
Hee hee, sounds funny when read aloud. I slay me.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You're being kind. I used to work at a large university that rolled out PeopleSoft in 1998 to deal with the "Y2K" problem. It replaced a text/hyper-terminal based purchasing system that'd only taken over the entire university about ... 3 years previously (my department was the last to go online, I was the reason). I'd name names of university and departments, but the university might sue.
A bigger piece of gobshite I have yet to see than that version of PeopleSoft. The program wasn't prepared for over 4,000 users all needing varied levels of abilities and privileges. It didn't allow users to use anything but the pre-entered list of items (really useful, how often does a lab need to buy a gas chromatagraph, and when it needs a new one, it's a new model). It bombed when saving and wouldn't allow you to get back to the previous order. It allowed null passwords for users. The training was lousy and the manuals stank. In short, it sucked.
At least one of the major version upgrades was forced by that university's demands. It still sucks, and now the university is using the PeopleSoft time collection system ... which when I left still required manual entry of time cards, and couldn't track vacation balances. My department was hiring a full time person for that job (150 or so employees in that department, most unionized and very cognizant of their entitlements.)
obviously there is some hostility toward amerika from the 3rd world off-shore countries. you fail to realize though, that our sending jobs to your misogynistic backward countries means you become like amerika, and we become like you. then we will be the off-shore 3rd world, but we will have a shitload of privately held weapons; something chutney-ville or 10-paki-a-day-stan doesn't have.
This same sh*t happened in data entry in the 70's. those were 25-30 a day jobs and knowing how to type put you in the elite. now they are off-shored and 5 bucks an hour.
When peoplesoft closes up shop, the pleasanton-dublin area is going to go bust. about 4000 p-soft people buy cars and houses and food and services, and that has just gone away. we won't even be able to visit your indian restaurants, so it'll be back to bangalore for some immigrants.
it's all inter-connected and inter-dependent; so gleefully telling a p-soft person to look for a job is akin to telling yourself to look for a job.
The microsoft link you provided does NOT recommend it, as you so desperately try to put it. It's a knowledge base link that explains the limitations of putting SQL Server on the same box running IIS.
(Amazing how people go looking for any information, however unrelated, when trying to make their point.)
Looking at all your other posts on the subject I get the distinct impression you've never even worked on another database besides MySQL. MySQL has it's place, but your posts are pretty blatant trolls that try to push MySQL as the answer for everything. It's not. It's great for read only databases on the web, and not much else. Even with that, you have your choice of other databases now.