PeopleSoft president and chief executive officer Craig
Conway played down Oracle's attempts to take over his company,
saying that he did not see Oracle's takeover attempt as a viable
threat.
"That saga has been over for two months," he said. "[Oracle CEO]
Larry Ellison every week contacts Reuters, AP and Bloomberg and
says, 'You know, I'm still interested in acquiring PeopleSoft,' and
they dutifully put it out on the wire instead of asking why
[Oracle's] application business has been at its lowest level since
1998.
"The story here is that Oracle has kept that pretty well
camouflaged as they tried to convince the world this [takeover
offer] is still in play, and no one is paying attention. It's like
an old movie that no one is going to any more."
Conway brushed off the suggestion that Oracle's offer to
PeopleSoft 7 customers that in the event of takeover it would
support the software for at least 10 years led to the changes in
technical support his company unveiled last month.
"We will support Version 7 forever. We're still offering
technical support and bug fixes for PeopleSoft 2. That was a great,
classic play on words by Larry, implying we didn't support
PeopleSoft 7. What we did recently was expand the amount of time
you get upgrades and scripts and tax tables to make customer
support even sweeter. The core technical support has been
indefinite since the beginning of time," he said.
Conway added that SAP is the only company ahead of PeopleSoft.
That's unlike even two years ago where, when you looked at the two
companies, in some areas one would have what the other doesn't.
When told that some users are questioning PeopleSoft's
commitment to JD Edwards' green-screen World products and want to
see that software maintained as a third line of business, Conway
said, "It is a third line of business. And I think there's an
absolute desire for our AS/400 customers to have enhancements and
developments and innovations. The AS/400 product is supported both
in World and EnterpriseOne. But most innovations are on the modern
architecture, EnterpriseOne."
Marc L Songini writes for
Computerworld