Oracle buyout gets mixed reviews from PeopleSoft customers

Computerworld - Today's announcement of Oracle Corp.'s $10.3 billion buyout of PeopleSoft Inc. isn't drawing rave reviews from the installed based of customers about to be acquired in the deal.
Perhaps feeling the angst most are onetime users of J.D. Edwards & Co. products. J.D. Edwards was itself acquired by PeopleSoft last year in a friendly takeover just about the same time the Oracle-PeopleSoft fight began.
"We are scrambling to move to the most current version of the software, but now we have to wonder if we are getting our ducks in a row just to have to prepare for another conversion to a hybrid Oracle/PeopleSoft/J.D. Edwards product," said Robert Robinson, business systems director at Durr Industries Inc. He expressed concern about having to move to a "pure Oracle" platform, and he said he worries that he will have to migrate from the IBM iSeries [AS/400] hardware platform to Unix, historically the platform of choice for Oracle.
The Plymouth, Mich.-based automotive supplier is looking to upgrade from World to EnterpriseOne 8.10.
Robinson noted that Oracle officials expressed ambivalence about the PeopleSoft-J.D. Edwards merger when Oracle launched its bid for PeopleSoft, and executives even entertained the idea of spinning J.D. Edwards back off. Oracle's official position on J.D. Edwards -- spelled out on Oracle's Web site -- is still sketchy, and Robinson said it has given him "absolutely nothing to grab or hold on to."
"As a customer of PeopleSoft, I'm concerned," said Bubba Tyler, CIO at Conshohocken, Pa.-based Quaker Chemical Corp. "I fully expect there to be a lot of distraction and confusion as the firms try and merge. I also expect to have new account contacts, changes in program offerings and other events which are distracting to the customers." He said he doesn't see "the potential benefit to the customer."
"I'm disappointed. But business is business, I suppose," said Casey McMullen, director of information systems at Agri Beef Co., a beef supplier in Boise, Idaho, which runs Enterprise financial applications. He speculated that the takeover won't be popular for the PeopleSoft installed base, but he noted that "the shareholders' pockets apparently cried louder than the voices of the vast majority of PeopleSoft customers."
Agri Beef isn't an Oracle fan, and McMullen said he's not going to depend on Oracle support for his software. "The chances are good we'll be someone else's customer in 10 to 12 years," he said.
That thinking was echoed in a recent survey of 150 PeopleSoft customers by Boston-based AMR Research Inc. Of those surveyed, 15% said they