PeopleSoft's CEO Says Oracle Offer No Longer Seen as Threat

Computerworld - PeopleSoft Inc. last week reported a smaller-than-expected loss of $7.3 million for the third quarter on revenue of $624 million. The Pleasanton, Calif.-based company said it would have been profitable if not for costs related to its August acquisition of J.D. Edwards & Co. Craig Conway, PeopleSoft's president and CEO, spoke with Computerworld about the results, PeopleSoft's effort to fend off a hostile takeover bid by Oracle Corp. and other topics. Excerpts follow.

Does PeopleSoft see Oracle's takeover attempt as a viable threat? That saga has been over for two months. [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 anymore.

Both Ellison and Oracle Executive Vice President Chuck Phillips have claimed that PeopleSoft users have approached them with approvals of the offer. Is there any validity to that? Have they provided referenceable customers?

No. My gosh! I can't believe that. That's surprising.

Did Oracle's offer to support PeopleSoft 7 for at least 10 years lead to the changes in technical support that you announced 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.

Do you have any comment about your third-quarter financial results? We beat guidance by 7 cents [per share] in earnings, and license revenue was way above the [predicted] range. The data speaks for itself. We had 175 brand-new, never-been-sold-to customers in the third quarter. We had the average transaction size sales price increase, not decrease. Eleven customers were cross-sell customers [with J.D. Edwards], and we haven't trained the sales force in cross-selling yet.

Craig Conway, CEO at PeopleSoft Inc.