Oracle Users Eye PeopleSoft

As the Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL)/PeopleSoft Inc. (Nasdaq: PSFT) soap opera returns for another season, the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based firms customers are urging Oracle to support some of PeopleSoft’s core products, should the takeover bid prove successful.

So far, the PeopleSoft board has resisted the takeover, prompting a slew of courtroom battles and an intensifying war of words between the two companies. Against this backdrop, a number of Oracle customers contacted by NDCF this week admitted that they have already got their eye on some of PeopleSoft’s best offerings.

Carl Esposito, IT Director at the New York City Board of Education Retirement System is pretty excited about the ERP products that PeopleSoft acquired when it bought J.D Edwards last year.

”I would hope that Oracle either keeps the J.D Edwards product line as a separate product line or incorporates it into its existing products,” he says. “It’s got a good reputation as a compact and focused product.”

Ronan Miles, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group cites both J.D Edwards and some of PeopleSoft’s payroll applications as particularly appealing. “Integrating them well will be of significant benefit to [Oracle] customers,” he says.Overall, the Oracle users see a rosy future for a combined Oracle/PeopleSoft. ”I think that the PeopleSoft acquisition could increase Oracle’s strategic ability to battle the Microsoft behemoth,” says Dr Paul Dorsey, president of consulting firm Dulcian Inc., which uses most of the Oracle product family.

”They have the ability to potentially increase their user base and gain some very nice marketshare, as well as gaining some very good technology,” he adds.

Esposito feels pretty much the same. “It will greatly increase Oracle’s customer base for applications if the deal goes through,” he says. “Hopefully they will be able to put some of the money from that back into improving the Oracle applications and strengthening that product line.”

This is in stark contrast to the concerns expressed by some of their PeopleSoft counterparts, who are edgy about what the future holds (see Uneasy Days for PeopleSoft Users).

But, do the Oracle users feel that Larry Ellison has taken his eye off his own customers while he dukes it out with the PeopleSoft board? Not at all, according to Dorsey. “I don’t see any evidence that they are pulling resources from their database products or their application server product lines."Dorsey also feels that Oracle has a good track record of successfully integrating new technologies, such as the TopLink database mapping tool it acquired from WebGain Inc. in 2002.

”They didn’t get rid of the TopLink people, and they didn’t get rid of the TopLink product,” he says.

However, swallowing up PeopleSoft would be a much bigger job. Oracle has already said that it will support PeopleSoft users for at least 10 years and will develop a next generation of products called PeopleSoft 9. But the company's users have called for more detail on these plans.

A spokeswoman for Oracle declined to provide any comment for this article.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-Gen Data Center Forum0