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"Our greatly expanded development team will focus our resources on creating next generation information-oriented applications based completely on industry standards," said Larry Ellison yesterday, days after slashing 9% of his combined new workforce, as he announced that Oracle will be developing a new application combining the best features of both Oracle and PeopleSoft products.
Prior to its announcement of the financial details of the takeover, which is due to take place next week - on January 26 - in New York, Oracle met with reporters yesterday at its Redwood Shores, CA, headquarters. The agenda: how Larry Ellison's Oracle-PeopleSoft is going to become a major thorn in the side for the current market leader in the world of business software, the German giant SAP.
Larry Ellison announced that the new merged company will support PeopleSoft product lines until 2013 and will go ahead with releasing PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0. He is expecting the newly merged company to retain PeopleSoft customers at the same 95% rate it currently retains its own users.
Confirming that Oracle won't buy another company until it has successfully integrated PeopleSoft, Ellison reckoned it would take 3-4 years to complete "Project Fusion" - to develop a product combining the software of both companies.
Any "Project Fusion" products would be written in Java and use standards-based rules to allow easy integration with other applications, and Ellison will personally babysit the endeavor: "My biggest focus is on Project Fusion," he said.
Oracle-PeopleSoft intends to take the game to SAP, which in turn recently rolled out database server software, NetWeaver, aimed to steal marketshare from Oracle. It promises to be a gargantuan struggle between the newly merged company and the German giant.
"We will win," asserted Ellison characteristically.
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