Jason Stamper's Blog: December 2004 Archives

PeopleSoft: Was it Really Worth It?
December 13, 2004

So PeopleSoft finally folded and succumbed to the Larry Ellison juggernaut. The immediate question I would have for PeopleSoft is this: was it really worth continuing to fight the bid since February, which was when Oracle upped its offer to $26 per share? You've settled for $26.50 per share anyway, and the legal wrangling, diversion of management attention and customer uncertainty have all cost you dear. You have made slightly more than $26 per share, but it could just as easily be argued that embracing the deal at an earlier stage - while still arguing the corner for the best price possible of course - would have served both companies better in the long run. A lot of dirty laundry has been aired over the course of the negotiations, and customers and prospects are unlikely to forget that, particularly as they ponder the unfolding roadmap for the combined Oracle-PeopleSoft applications suite.

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Posted by on 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

Playing the Numbers Game
December 09, 2004

And your meaningless statistic of the day is: "95% of UK bosses see IT security as a major concern." That's according to a CBI/QinetiQ Business Security Survey, conducted by MORI.

The fact is, if you went up to someone and said, 'is the recent spate of burglaries and muggings in your area a major concern', 95% of people would say 'yes'. If you said, 'are you moving out of this area, getting a new burglar alarm, or adding metal grills to your doors and windows as a result of the recent burglaries', how many people would say 'yes' then? Hmmm?

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PeopleSoft to Buy Oracle? Whatever Next?
December 01, 2004

There was a funny commentary on Oracle's ongoing fight to take over PeopleSoft on CBS MarketWatch the other day, which asked the question of whether PeopleSoft could turn the tables and take over Oracle.

The column rightly pointed out that companies threatened with a hostile takeover have employed the so-called "Pac-Man Defence" in the past. It's simple really - the company being pursued turns around and starts a hostile takeover of its pursuer, just like in the Pac-Man arcade game.

The only thing is, the Pac-Man Defence only works when the companies are of roughly equal size, or at least have about the same market cap. After all, it is tricky for a company to acquire another far larger than itself, and nigh on impossible if it doesn't have the blessing of that larger company either.

With PeopleSoft's market cap at $8.7bn at the time of writing, does it really have much chance of acquiring Oracle, whose market cap sits at around $66 billion? Of course there is no chance.

Still, you can't really blame CBS: the story appeared just after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, so it must have been a pretty slow news day. It's not a bad strategy: next time we have a slow news day we might write a piece asking whether Salesforce.com might buy Siebel. Actually, thinking about it, that could really happen, as long as you make the possible time frame long enough - say, by 2020? Then just add a Gartner-style probability rating and you have a winning story: "Salesforce.com Could Acquire Siebel by 2020 (0.5 probability)." That has got to sell some newspapers!

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Posted by on 05:13 AM | Comments (0)