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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.
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.
Considering that Oracle made 10.30B last year alone, I think this is probably a wise investment for them. PeopleSoft's software fits nicely within the framework that Oracle is already able to build and offer to it's customers. This move will surely broaden the markets with which Oracle can move into and deploy their products...
SAP is the major competition in the ERP market. If I remember correctly, SAP has a larger customer base than Oracle and PeopleSoft combined.
A horizontal merger is one in which both companies compete for the same market. For instance, if MS were to buy out Oracle's database platform and services, that would be a horizontal merger, since MS already has SQL Server.
:)
A vertical merger is one in which, for instance, one company uses a product of the other company in order to build and sell their own product. An example of this would be if a cellular service provider were to buy a cell phone manufacturer. (I don't know of any real-world instances of this; it's only a theoretical example.)
Hope that helps
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
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.
- Hiring a couple of in-house programmers for a year to do development is probably not much more expensive (perhaps even cheaper) than paying the proprietary software to begin with, espessailly once you get customizations done.
Hiring a couple of in-house programmers for a year will get you jack squat progress towards a full-blown home-rolled ERP system.I will wager you could pull off something like a inventory management package or order management interface that would work in a small company, but there is no way a "couple of in-house programmers" could produce anything close to an Oracle/PeopleSoft/Great Plains/SAP type system.
The system flexability, business knowledge requirements, legal issues, tax issues, GAAP requirements, Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, etc. would overwhelm any small team. Couple that with the need for on-going support and upgrades, regulatory updated (taxes, SoX, etc.) and you've got a team of hundreds working on the project.
"But it's open-source!" you cry, "We'll give it to the community and let them extend and build it!" Without a in-stone development plan you would just have a ton of people all working on various bits and it would be difficult if not impossible because you would have a hard time determining where someone would fit into the project based on their desire to contribute and their skills/background.
If you could manage to pull all this off - you would have to offer some type of 24x7 support if you wanted anyone else to use your software. No company that would need an ERP solution would touch one without serious support backing it up. So you setup a division to charge for and provide 24x7 technical support (and don't forget you'll need to provide functional support too).
Guess what; you just re-built an SAP or a PeopleSoft.