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Ellison still 'determined' to acquire PeopleSoft
Will they, won't they..does anyone except Oracle still care?

By Alorie Gilbert

Published: Wednesday 10 September 2003

Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison has repeated his determination to acquire rival PeopleSoft, but was cagey about whether he would raise the offer price of his hostile takeover bid.

Questioned about whether Oracle can acquire PeopleSoft at its current offer price of $19.50 per share, Ellison replied: "Who knows?"

Ellison made the comment during a press briefing at the OracleWorld conference in San Francisco, following his keynote speech. He also said his pursuit of the company is far from over. "We're very determined to complete this acquisition, and we're very patient," he said.

That means Oracle may again extend its tender offer deadline, now set for 17 October. Oracle has extended the date four times since launching the bid in early June as it awaits conclusion to the Department of Justice's antitrust review of the deal.

The offer price has become a topic of debate recently as PeopleSoft's stock has steadily climbed over the past week, making Oracle's offer less appetising to PeopleSoft investors. With Wall Street optimism building over PeopleSoft's merger with JD Edwards, PeopleSoft's shares closed at $18.82 Tuesday.

Yet if Oracle raises the bid much higher than the $7.25bn now on the table, Oracle stakeholders may feel they aren't getting such a good deal, analysts say. And as Ellison reiterated Tuesday: "We like to buy on sale."

Ellison dismissed comments made last week by PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway that "the Oracle saga is over." If Conway really felt that way, Ellison suggested, he wouldn't have offered PeopleSoft customers a money-back guarantee that's good only if the company is acquired. "The man has to learn to be consistent," Ellison said of Conway. PeopleSoft renewed the refund plan last month. The company originally slated the program to end on 30 June after the close of the PeopleSoft's second quarter.

Ellison also discussed at length his company's work on a concept known as grid computing. He touted grid computing - pooling the computing power of hundreds of severs over a network - as the biggest innovation in information technology since IBM introduced the mainframe in 1964. He said: "Grid computing is the first real new approach to enterprise computing in 40 years. Finally, we have something new to talk about." Oracle's approach to grid computing, embodied in a new line of products slated for release near the end of the year, overcomes some of the biggest limitations in computing today, Ellison said. In his estimation, those limitations are that today's complex business applications are hitting a ceiling in computing capacity; adding processing power is too expensive; and that current systems are prone to crashing. With competitors IBM and Microsoft also placing stakes in grid computing, Ellison said a main distinction of Oracle's grid technology is its ability to run business applications from SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and Oracle itself more efficiently.

"And you don't have to change a single line of code" within the applications, he said.

With that feature, companies will no longer have to buy a box of servers dedicated to running payroll, for instance, which sit idle except for a few days at the end of every pay period, Ellison said. The only obstacle to Oracle's grid plans, Ellison said in a later press briefing, is that "people hate change." Grid computing, he said, will shake up workers in IT departments and corporate data centres, forcing them to learn new skills or find their jobs outsourced to places like India. He said executives may also struggle with the "fundamental restructuring of business" that grid computing represents, making companies operate more globally. But during his keynote speech, Ellison sought to quell such fears, saying grid computing will free Oracle database administrators and CIOs from having to figure out how to make systems work together.

Alorie Gilbert writes for CNET News.com