Federal Judge Rules Oracle can Bid for PeopleSoft

terrymaster69 writes "The NY Times reports (free reg, required) that Oracle may have the go ahead to continue its hostile bidding for PeopleSoft. The Justice Department had previously tried to paint the merger as anti-competitive in the corporate services software market. 'Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the Federal District Court in San Francisco rejected the government's definition of the market as too narrow, noting that the software business is particularly dynamic, with a host of current and emerging competitors in that area including Microsoft.'"

Comments

Re:not out of the woods

[LostCluster]

"3 major players"... but there are a ton of industry-specific ERP-ish systems out there for every industry you can think of ranging from office supply sellers to construction project managers. Also, there's plenty of business out there who skip over the full marketplace and hire a programmer to make their own resource tracking program using tools as simple as Microsoft Access which works great for a truely small business even though its scalablity is limited.

I agree with the judge here... the ERP software field is filled with players small and large. There's no monopoly risk in letting Oracle and PeopleSoft merge... just like there's far more places that sell hambugers than McDonald's and Burger King. Just because their two of the biggest, doesn't make a merger that creates a monopoly possible.

Re:Point

[skaffen42]

Microsoft have considered buying SAP have they? Don't make us all laugh now. SAP is as big, if not bigger, than Microsoft.

Dude, what have you been smoking? SAP has a market cap of about $46 billion and anual revenue of about $9 billion a year. Microsoft has a market cap of nearly $300 billion and revenues of around $37 billion a year. So I'm not really sure how you can claim SAP is as big as MS.

For comparison, Oracle has a market cap of $51 billion vs. Peoplesoft's market cap of $7 billion. Looking at it that way, the ratio in sizes between MS/SAP compared to Oracle/Peoplesoft is about the same.

Draw your own conclusions...