Fiduciary duty

Remember Craig Conway? He was the PeopleSoft head who didnt treat Oracles offer very seriously. PeopleSofts board reacted the way any board should when confronted with a CEO who doesnt hold their fiduciary interests at heart: It showed him the door. Craig who? Kagermann is obviously a bit wiser to the ways of fiduciary duty. Anyway, as Hamerman pointed out, Oracles too broke to afford a pricy company like SAP. Its shelled out some $11 billion on acquisitions lately. Microsoft, in comparison, had $50 billion on hand back when it was chatting with SAP about a potential merger. "[Microsoft] could probably swing it, but … I think it would be challenging for Oracle to raise that kind of money at this point," Hamerman said. Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst with Enterprise Applications Consulting, was at an SAP board meeting just this week. He assured me that these people are not trying to merge with Oracle. Oracle is definitely "top of mind," Greenbaum told me, but when youre talking about the largest enterprise applications vendors in the world, that can connote quite a different meaning than the urge to merge. It could mean, quite simply, plain old non-merging competition. Lisa Vaas is Ziff Davis Internets news editor in charge of operations, aka Conference Goddess. She is also the editor of eWEEK.coms Database and Business Intelligence topic center. She has been with eWEEK and eWEEK.com since 1995, most recently covering enterprise applications and database technology. Editors Note: This story was updated to correct Craig Conways name. Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest database news, reviews and analysis.