Oracle Execs Continue Pitch for PeopleSoft

Phillips and Rocha try to sell Oracle's $6.3 billion bid for enterprise software rival PeopleSoft.

Oracle Corp. executives met with shareholders of PeopleSoft Inc. this week to convince them to buy into Oracles $6.3 billion takeover bid for PeopleSoft. Now the executives are meeting with the press to better explain the rationale behind the plan. Two Oracle executive vice presidents are giving assurances that PeopleSoft customers would never be forced to migrate to Oracles applications should Oracle succeed in acquiring PeopleSoft. Oracle Executive Vice President Chuck Phillips gave assurances Friday that PeopleSoft customers would never be forced to migrate to Oracles applications should Oracle succeed in acquiring PeopleSoft.
"No [PeopleSoft] customers will be required to migrate [to Oracles applications]," Phillips said during a conference call with reporters. He went on to say that Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., would support PeopleSofts existing products for longer than PeopleSofts own support commitments currently run and would make enhancements to those products as well. "If and only if a customer elects to move to Oracle, they will be moved to Oracle," Phillips said. "If they choose to stay put, they can stay put for years to come. Therell be no requirement to move." In an interview with eWEEK Online, Mike Rocha, executive vice president of Oracle Support Services, acknowledged that a migration from PeopleSoft applications to Oracles E-Business Suite was not a trivial matter. But he said that with access to PeopleSofts software code Oracle will be able to develop ways to make that migration easier. "We will take PeopleSoft developers and tools and figure out how to take some of the best PeopleSoft ideas into the Oracle suite so there is a reason [for PeopleSoft users] to migrate" to E-Business Suite, Rocha said. "We are after the customers and we want to make them happy; forcing migration to Oracle isnt going to make them happy."