Conway to Ellison: It's over
Published: 28 Aug 2003 15:50 BST
So what do you think he's trying to accomplish?
I think the intent originally was to disrupt the J.D. Edwards acquisition and harm PeopleSoft's business. When you have a company that's pulled off something impressive in terms of products, that's moved ahead of you pretty convincingly -- I think he's reached down and tried to attack that company.
Do you think he'll be left with no other decision than to call off his chase?
I don’t know. I really can't speculate about what's going on in his head. One of the things about Larry Ellison is that no matter how well you know him, it's trying to predict the unpredictable. What I will say is that on 4 September [when PeopleSoft hosts an analyst meeting in New York] I think there will either be profound confidence in the resulting PeopleSoft product line, business model, earnings projections -- or there won't. The situation that exists today is that Oracle is very critically regarded by customers... call up 10 customers and ask how they feel about Oracle these days and they'll tell you they don't like it. The longer it goes on, the more there is a contrast between Oracle, the potential business partner, and PeopleSoft, the potential business partner.
There are lots of moving points to this merger battle with Oracle -- poison pills, lawsuits, antitrust investigations. Which is the most critical active front of the battle and how is it being fought?
None of them. It's not really being fought much anymore. It's pretty much over. In June-July, it was a big, big story -- kind of the Oracle "shock and awe" campaign. But beginning the first week of July, the thing started to die a rapid death. From the beginning, the approach taken by Oracle was not so much to acquire PeopleSoft as to disrupt the business and block the J.D. Edwards acquisition. By the first week of July, two things happened that started to put all that to bed: instead of disrupting our business, we had a record Q2... and then the Justice Department issued a proactive approval... They actually proactively commented that they thought it was in customers' best interests.
But Ellison isn't going away. The offer's still out there until 19 September.
The offer can be extended indefinitely. You can extend the offer every 30 days until the end of time. The only thing you have to do is tell the market how many shares have been tendered. But as you see, even those are going down. Now there's 8 percent or less of shares tendered and there's no arbitrage holders of our stock anymore... the saga is over. I don't spend any time on it anymore. All of our attention is now on maximising J.D. Edwards.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
135 out of 291 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
