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What's it all about, Larry?

Tags:
Takeover

Gary Flood ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Dec 2003 14:05 GMT

The major issue facing the enterprise business apps space moving into 2004 has to be the state of play re Oracle's attempted acquisition of rival PeopleSoft.

This has less to do with any of the antler-clashing going on between the protagonists as with the implications for the software landscape in general. If colourful Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is right, his swoop on PeopleSoft is not as much to do with the specific changes in the apps market as it is a bellwether for wider and more troubling shifts in the wider industry.

That's because Ellison's argument -- in public -- is that Silicon Valley is dead. "The idea that Silicon Valley is going to come back and be anything like it was in the past with hundreds and thousands of start-ups, the Silicon Valley of old where people talk about deal flow and venture capital, a new company every day -- that's over, and that's a good thing," he told BusinessWeek in August.

IT doesn't matter
By which he means that the IT industry has matured to the point where fewer and fewer large players will inevitably and calmly preside over a less frantic supplier universe. Ellison's bid for PeopleSoft, in this light, is part of a wider Zeitgeist, a march to the drum of history. Significantly or not, Oracle's move came a month after the Harvard Business Review's pessimistic May article, "IT Doesn't Matter", which said users should cut IT investment and work with fewer suppliers.

Could be. What we do know is that this has all turned very nasty indeed. As it stands, Oracle's June hostile takeover bid (the value of which has since been raised to $7.3bn) has been rejected by the current PeopleSoft board. PeopleSoft's global director of corporate public relations, Steve Swasey, is adamant his company regards the bid as dead, given if nothing else that his company's stock is now trading in the low $20s and Oracle hasn't revised its $19.50 revised bid.

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