At an event its headquarters in Redwood City, the company brought out senior executives, partners and customers, to sing the praises of the newly merged company and lay out the vision for what is now the second-largest applications vendor.
Oracle senior vice president of applications John Wookey laid out the roadmap, with dates, for the delivery future PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Oracle applications, and announced an integration path, Project Fusion.
PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 will be completed in 2005, he said. Oracle E-Business Suite 12 will come next year, as will PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12. JDE World updates will be delivered continuously, he said.
Oracle said it will support PeopleSoft Enterprise, EnterpriseOne and World product lines until at least 2013, and has extended EnterpriseOne XE and 8.0 support to February 2007.
As for new sales, Oracle’s existing suite will be the focus. If the customer should demand PeopleSoft, we’re happy to exchange our software for money Ellison said. PeopleSoft prices will now be published, he said.
We don’t intend to raise prices, we may very well lower them, Ellison said. It’s much more likely we lower them than leave them the same, but we’ll defiitely publish them.
Oracle’s salesforce will try to persuade you, if you ask an Oracle salesperson what product should I buy, and you’re a net new customer… we will recommend and push for E-Business suite, he said.
None of which was especially surprising. The company could have faced a huge refund liability if it neglected its new customers, under PeopleSoft’s Customer Assurance Program.
Project Fusion, however, represents a strategic shift for Oracle. Cherry-picking functionality from all three companies’ products and built on Java and internet standards such DHTML, Ellison said Fusion will be his biggest focus for the next few years.
It will use internet standards, a relational database, and a role-based security model that’s built into the database, Ellison said. We want all the security to be in the database and middleware, to get the advantages of single sign-on and intrusion prevention that you don’t get if you deploy a SAP solution.
Base Project Fusion components, data hubs and transaction bases, will start shipping next year. The first Fusion will start to becoming available in 2007, Wookey said. The full suite will come in 2008, he said.
The move, at least in terms of the promotional talk, seems to steal a page from the IBM WebSphere playbook, in terms of building a Java-based standards-oriented applications platform.
It seems to correspond to PeopleSoft’s vow to base its products on WebSphere, under a vague $1bn, five-year deal PeopleSoft’s previous CEO, Craig Conway, struck with IBM just days before his termination last September.
Fusion does not look like it will be WebSphere-oriented, however. Oracle executives have previously expressed doubt that Conway’s swansong is worth the paper it may or may not have been written on.
When asked about IBM’s future as an Oracle partner yesterday, Ellison focussed elsewhere: With IBM the relationship has dramatically changed, he said. I think the relationship with IBM Global Services will be greatly expanded.
Ellison added that the company’s support relationship with Microsoft will be expanded. There is already a support deal in place relating to Windows, and this will be expanded to include PeopleSoft running on SQL Server, he said.
He said he doesn’t expect the customer attrition rate to be any greater with PeopleSoft customers than Oracle’s regular retention rate of about 95%.
What incentive could there be for them to change? he said. If PeopleSoft were to lose customers they would have lost customers during the period of uncertainty before the acquisition was finalized.
He also dismissed the notion of a crippling culture clash between the two firms, despite reports last week that PeopleSoft employees are dreading working for Oracle, which management fended off for so long.
Senior management at Oracle has always been engineering-oriented, while the senior management at PeopleSoft for the last couple of years, strangely enough, has all been ex-Oracle salespeople, Ellison said.
Conway was one of the most aggressive sales executives in the history of Oracle, Ellison said. I have a problem reconciling that with the idea that they’re warm and fuzzy and we’re hard-edged and aggressive.
He said Oracle is likely to make more acquisitions in future, hopefully friendlier ones, and said he sees Oracle as the primary consolidator of the enterprise software industry.
Long-term, only Microsoft, SAP and Oracle will remain as enterprise-grade applications vendors, he said, while leaving room for smaller vendors such as Intuit and NetSuite.
We’d be foolish to take on another acquisition before we have proved to all our stakeholders that we have successfully concluded this acquisition, he said.
