Testimony at the trial from Lawson Software Inc’s top executive confirmed that the company was in talks about a possible takeover by Oracle Corp back in 2002.
However Jay Coughlan, president and CEO of St Paul, Minnesota-based Lawson, also said the company was no longer interested in such a merger.
Asked by the judge if Lawson was still interested in pursuing merger talks, Coughlan emphatically replied no.
The DOJ is trying to block Oracle’s $7.7bn hostile takeover of PeopleSoft on anti-competitive grounds.
Oracle sought Coughlan’s testimony to demonstrate that the business applications software market would still remain competitive in spite of its proposed takeover of its nearest rival PeopleSoft.
The DOJ’s lead attorney however questioned Coughlan’s testimony saying it was biased. He claimed that while Oracle consistently named Lawson as a competitor, the company had inadvertently generated sales and marketing opportunities for Lawson. This prompted Lawson to run an expensive Thanks Oracle advert in the Wall Street Journal in April this year.
The DOJ argues that Lawson, along with SAP, do not compete closely nor regularly enough with either Oracle or PeopleSoft in the US. A merger between the latter two would potentially raise the cost of business applications software in the US.
Coughlan disagrees, saying that the company competed on almost every account, and on several occasions has beat PeopleSoft and Oracle in competitive tenders.
Earlier during the one-month trial being held in San Francisco, a PeopleSoft executive said that Lawson rarely competed against PeopleSoft.
Despite boasting marquee customers like McDonalds Corp and Safeway Inc, Lawson Software has never quite managed to move out of the shadow of larger business application software players like PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP AG.
Lawson’s admission comes on the heels of earlier revelations of Oracle’s hit-list of nine companies it thought about buying (which included Lawson), merger talks between SAP AG and Microsoft Corp, and a possible Microsoft stake in PeopleSoft.
