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."

Comments

Competition is good but....

[BWJones]

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?

Re:Competition is good but....

[nial-in-a-box]

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 agency recently, but let's just say that the products are just terrible. Not to mention they tend to depend on Oracle anyway, so this takeover actually makes sense.

Re:Competition is good but....

[stanwirth]

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

Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

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:This will never happen...

[Graelin]

Don't be so sure about that. Just because the code is GPLed now, doesn't require future versions to be.

Existing versions can be supported by the community but the product would suffer greatly.

Peoplesoft poisoning the well?

[An Onerous Coward]

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?

It should be legal

[nurb432]

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 there has been a distinct move of Peoplesoft recently away from Oracle DB, they need to catch this before it gets out of hand.

Re:Oracle fires missile over DOJ's bow, film at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what "Overrated" is for isn't it?

Re:Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Ora

[FatherOfONe]

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.

Re:Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Ora

[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.

The Database Company with delusions of ERP

[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 millions. Oracle has never and will never be an ERP software provider. Ellison thinks that a database is the same as an ERP. Oracle is probably the worst Database to support an ERP system. Oracle is not even that great an DBM for enterprise wide use. Ask anyone who has had to deal with using Oracle to do syncronised manufacturing on multiple continents. Posting anon because I don't want to lose my job untill I am ready to move, and this post will cost me my job in the current Agilent working enviroment. Bill Gates is having fun at one end while Larry Ellison is having fun at the other. I think every once in the while, they switch places.

Re:It should be legal-customers disagree.-II

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's not like they can force a company to offer a product."

They can however prevent a merger, or buyout[1].

Also I think you missed the subtext.

A company is causing grief to those who make the rules. Generally that's not considered a wise thing. Like or dislike, that's the way the world works.

[1] The government does indeed look at the consequences. Remember the ATC strike (legitimate though the grieviences may have been), or the more recent dock workers strike.

Corporate ambition must have checks and balances, else we all will suffer for it.

I hope Oracle takes over!

[AstroDrabb]

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.

Re:Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Ora

[Phroggy]

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.

Re:Anyone feel this has big-time backfired for Ora

[Joey Vegetables]

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.