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PeopleSoft Deflects Oracle Takeover, So Far
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."
> 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.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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.
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 store to house it is invariably much cheaper than any CRM package.
What usually happens is that a CRM package is deployed, and people are forced to use it. Data that doesn't "fit" ends up being discarded, even though it may be tremendously valuable, and the valuable business rules and processes encapsulated in the legacy systems are lost, thereby creating problems in great abundance. Managers initially are happy that their information is now "centralized." Problems are blamed either on user groups or the CRM vendor. Eventually it usually becomes clear that a CRM package was not the "silver bullet" that would cure all IT woes, but by the time the PHBs realize this, it's way too late to turn back.
Nonaggression works!
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.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
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. If the client has a hundred experienced Win32 developers and sysadmins, and has spent 15 years developing their applications, and you tell them that they don't know what they're doing, you won't get the job. In that situation, the right tool is Windows, simply because that's what the organization knows.
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.