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PeopleSoft Goes To Oracle
codecool writes "It is final. Peoplesoft's Board of directors finally relented and agreed to let Oracle have them for $26.50 per share. Finally, it all comes to an end." Closing date is set for mid-January timeframe.
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So, I wonder if PeopleSoft customers can take advantage of the full refunds on their software licenses that were being offered if Oracle succeeded. The article's a little short on details.
I think that it is about time this happened. Now both companies can get on about doing business. The match is a good one, and I think that both the customers and the companies will benefit. While I don't blame PS for trying to get the highest price for their stock, I think that they could have saved everyone a lot of time, money and frustration if they would have just put this one to bed a long time ago.
My
The top 4 out of 5 stories in the wsj.com site an hour back were-
Peoplesoft-Oracle.
JnJ- Guidant
Sprint-Nextel
Honeywell-Novar
London Stock Exchange- Deutsche Boerse
Lots of mergers/acquistions going on. Good for companies who want less competition. Bad for consumers.
Oracle may be a giant but competition does many things. Keeps prices down, drives innovation to be better than the alternative, etc. With peoplesoft not the competition, who will be Oracles competition? If there is no other big dog out there then the customer will loose.
Without competition, then there is no reason to get better and what sets the price.
Evolution or ID?
if a merger is vertical it tends to lower costs and is thus good for the consumer. arguably oracle/peoplesoft is vertical.
you are thinking of horizontal mergers. with the exception of JnJ- Guidant, and Sprint-Nextel (which i know little about), none of those listed are horizontal.
i'm trying to give up sigs.
Infact they make much more then that. ERP is lucrative business - believe me. I've been working on these systems for 6+ years now.
When i worked for Oracle - even the most basic project was a 2-5 million dollar project and that was before montly/yearly support plans and extended consulting fees.
There is money to be made, but also technology to be learned from. Peoplesoft has its HR roots and JD Edwards has its MRP/Manufacturing roots that oracle could learn tons from.
Since Oracle's stated goal was to simply buy PeopleSoft to destroy their product line (something which I still can't believe the judge is letting them get away with), wasn't there a poison pill that if Oracle discontinued their product they'd be liable to refund every customer in full? What happened to that?
After you have gone through a few of those, you'll come to realize the value of open source. People didn't use to think this was possible for OS'es or GUIs, but it turned out it was. They said open source wasn't reliable enough or secure enough or whatever, but they were wrong. And, yes, it is possible for the kinds of products PeopleSoft used to make as well.
Maybe your company and a bunch of other companies should get together and start working on an open source version of PeopleSoft's software. The good thing is that you don't have any legacy headaches and that you have great tools to work with.
Peoplesoft and IBM recently penned a strategic alliance to resell and promote each others' products. So I guess this will begoing the way of the dodo. Or will it? Will the contract language leave Oracle in the embarrassing position of promoting DB2 as the preferred database platform for Peoplesoft and JD Edwards?
I'm also wondering, long-term, about support from Oracle for Peoplsoft on platforms other than Oracle. Will Oracle support Peoplesoft on Oracle, Oracle, and Oracle? My understanding that most Peoplesoft implementations were historically SQL Server with the new preferred platform being DB2. if that changes again it'd be BIG headaches for DB2 customers...
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that Oracle had little interest in PeopleSoft's products and more interest in removing a competitor. PeopleSoft and IBM are tight (PeopleSoft's products can be deployed on WebSphere, I believe) and purchasing PeopleSoft (and stopping development on their products) would not only remove a competitor, it would also be detrimental to IBM. That's why PeopleSoft created the poison pill, they feared that Oracle would buy them and then stop supporting their customers and instead foist their own solutions on them. If you've already got PeopleSoft + WebSphere, it's not so difficult to go with DB2 over Oracle, but if you have Oracle already, you'll buy their DB too.
The match is a good one, and I think that both the customers and the companies will benefit.
Oracle is in the business of selling Relational Databases [RDBs]. Unfortunately, with competition from DB2/Informix, SQLServer, Sybase, Ingres, MySQL, Postgres, and a myriad of tiny little database vendors you've never heard of [Progress/ObjectStore, Intersystems/Cache, Versant/POET, Objectivity, etc], the database end of things is rapidly becoming little more than a commodity.
Increasingly, the profit is in the middleware & the front ends, where the business logic and the "schema" reside. Oracle is rather weak in those areas, hence its desire to subsume whatever logic/schema template vendors [and customer bases married to those templates] that it can get its grubby little hands on.
The problem is that most of Oracle's channel is pursuing the very same market, so that Oracle has, in effect, declared war on its own channel. And the road to business hell is paved with the skeletons of enterprises that thought they could screw the channel and get away with it.
Ever wonder why you can only order a Coca-Cola in a restaurant? Ie: Why is it that you can never find Pepsi products when you go out to eat? Setting aside the fact that Coke might have a better sales staff, a better management team, and a better product at a better price, the reason is that PepsiCo declared war on their channel when they purchased Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut.
And you know what the channel - from the little Mom-n-Pop restaurants down the street, all the way to the global oligopolies, like McDonald's & Burger King - had to say in response?
SCREW YOU, PEPSICO!!!
Larry Ellison, you have been forewarned...