Oracle Wants PeopleSoft For $5.1 Billion

from the everybody-wants-to-consolidate dept

Earlier this week when PeopleSoft announced plans to buy J.D. Edwards, I pointed out that it was odd that there hadn't been more "big" enterprise software mergers. I mentioned this to a friend at Oracle and wondered what Oracle would do in response. I was told that Oracle didn't really care about PeopleSoft or what they did. Apparently, that's not true, because this morning Oracle made a hostile $5.1 billion bid for PeopleSoft. Of course, when you look at the details, it makes you wonder how well thought out this is, or if it's just a Larry Ellison whim. Ellison's plan is basically to takeover PeopleSoft and shut it down. This isn't so much a merger, as a plan to get some of their intellectual property and get rid of one other enterprise software vendor. Oracle, of course, has had trouble selling its own enterprise software products, so it's a bit odd that they wouldn't at least try to keep some element of PeopleSoft's successful sales strategy in place. J.D. Edwards' partners are dismayed by the proposed deal saying that it's clearly a publicity stunt on Oracle's part to make it more difficult for the PeopleSoft-J.D. Edwards deal to go through. Don't you wish you had $5.1 billion to potentially waste on a "publicity stunt"? Update: PeopleSoft's response: this is "atrociously bad behavior from a company with a history of atrociously bad behavior."