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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."
... think of that scene from the Simpsons where Bill Gates offers to buyout Homer's Internet business? "Buy 'em out boys!"
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
> 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.
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?
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...because I think Oracle has its hands full making sure that its own software works.
From a June 3rd San Francisco Examiner article:
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.
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.
"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 keep Microsoft in your crosshairs and then he builds a case in 2000 based on the argument that Florida Supreme Court, not the Florida state law, sets the rules for how elections work. So being fair, I'd thought we'd just give you boys some time to build a real legal time this time. Next thing you know, he'll be suing President Bush for not properly defending our country from the 'looming threat of the heat death of the universe' given the way he likes to lose and make an ass out of himself. Have your people call mine, we'll do lunch and litigation."
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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"
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.
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.
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?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
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, our state's 2000 user project budget was 18 million and I think their scrapping it early after only three years, becuase it sucks. The big three are SAP (its a really long german name) Oracle, and Peoplesoft. There are many smaller usually more focused vendors, and still a few in house systems, but thats really about it.
If they did get any new business, it should have been offset by users who crapped bricks on the news that oracle would have dropped support and began plans to migrate to SAP. I really don't know what Oracle has to gain from the merger, it seems like the SAP clients are not very happy with the merger.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
Aha. I see now.
Your post has definitely enlightened me as to many things about Oracle, and I will look at both Oracle and PeopleSoft differently in the future.
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.
Err...what the government bought to run its systems should have no business in this matter. If a government is depending on a third-party for its software and the software stops being produced then it's the government's fault for being silly. It's not like Oracle is going to prevent people from running the versions of PeopleSoft that they are currently using. It's just that there would be no new versions after the merger. I doubt even then that the SEC could do anything about it. It's not like they can force a company to offer a product.
Also, companies do all sorts of things that cause their customers grief. (For instance, have you ever tried to use PeopleSoft?) It's because they only have one master, Wall Street. The customers who give them money are just an annoyance.
the SEC is about to takeover
:-) ... whether they do depends on what happens when the SEC steps in, intervenes, launches a review ...
Hate to be pedantic, but I think it's Oracle who wants to takeover
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.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
"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.
Either VMS on an Alpha or any IBM AIX system (not Alpha, get your info straight) will outperform any x86 box running any OS. This is especialy true of the example you gave. Face it, the x86 is a shitty architecture, no matter how many GHz you run it at.
...in the meantime I just enjoy my coffee out of this PeopleSoft/Oracle-mug (bought it about a year ago on a fleamarket, don't know it's origins or anything)
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.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
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"...
The people who usually decide between Oracle and PeopleSoft are usually the type you would associate with "evil" and "faceless".
Anything else will be inadequate.
If you write your own, it will no doubt be much more useful for your particular company.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
There's nothing new here. These are not the oracles you're looking for. Move on, find some real news.
Actually, I think most people in IT know all about PeopleSoft, the question is who has heard of an on budget functional PeopleSoft implementation?
Well I'm the doctor and I say you're dead, so shut up and take it like a man!
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.
Do you have any experience with any open source ones? I am curious if any of them are any good.
War is necrophilia.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
didn't orgs switch to SAP when they went Linux?
Yes, both of them did. The rest are still running on Windows.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
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.
Nonaggression works!
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
(This post has been reposted again, account some moronic moderator moderating it as "overrated" - moderators, you will never win, we are more numerous than you are)
I agree, but most.... well EVERY company that I see try and implement one of these solutions dumps a TON more money are resources than anticipated just to get the thing to work.
The exact same thing can be said about SAP.
In my opinion, if you HAVE to have one of these things, take the initial estimate and multiply it by 10 for cost and take the man hours and triple it. Then decide if it is worth the cost or not.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I believe that SAP's strong point is focused on accounting, and PeopleSofts is CRM. I would be willing to bet that SAP offers just about everything but don't most corps think of them as an accounting package?
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
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.
Well, it's not too late to fix it then. Why not open source of People Soft? Or even better - why not GPLize them? That's the best way to shrink the market of Oracle and SAP competing ERP products. As for a profit: I guess JDE's business model is based on support, not on licensing, anyway.
Less is more !
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.
I agree with you w.r.t mysql. Its fine for little web applications, etc but the performance pales in comparision to commercial RDBMS. What I don't understand, is why postgreSQL isn't more popular.. The latest versions are just as stable as mySQL and has a host of features compared to mysql. The only thing I can see, from reading newsgroups, etc is that postgresql had some issues in the past but from what I understand they have been address. mysql is like the MS Access of the database world. Why is it so popular?
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
OSX shows that Apple is committed to open source.
Apple is not committed to open source, they use open source and there's a big difference. If they were committed to open source they would have gone with Linux. The reason they went with BSD is more likely that they don't have to release all their changes to the public and this would not be allowed with Linux. This is sure to garner the, "look at the Darwin project idiot" responses to which I reply, have you tried to compile your own Darwin kernel to replace your stock kernel lately? I didn't think so. (Btw, do not try this, you may hose your system because the stock kernel boot process differs from the Darwin kernel boot process, see the Darwin FAQ for more info on Open Firmware). I'm sure if BSD was under the GPL, Apple wouldn't have given it a second look. If Apple really wanted to impress me with their devotion to open source, they would drop the "we're protecting our IP" line and offer the option of a Linux or BSD kernel. All that aside, I think Apple makes good products and software, and compared to the big-M, they're Richard Stallman himself, but there's no way that they're committed to open source.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
um. Who do you mean by 'everyone?' Do you actually mean 'everyone?' Most people have never heard of Oracle or Peoplesoft.
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 Peoplesoft.
Also DOJ anti-trust review is actually a real factor in any aquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle. If Oracle is allowed to buy Peoplesoft 3 of the major ERP product lines and 2 of the major CRM product lines will be combined in the same company. Expect SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Siebel, and other ERP, CRM, and database vendors to protest the merger to the DOJ.
If the merger appears as if it will be approved expect some action from IBM, Microsoft, and possibly SAP. IBM or Microsoft could easily buy out SAP or Siebel, and SAP may try to buy a smaller CRM or database vendor.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.