Word: conways
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...employees of PeopleSoft, based in Pleasanton, Calif., were not amused. CEO Craig Conway, 48, himself a former Ellison protege, had just successfully negotiated a $1.7 billion merger deal with another rival, Denver-based J.D. Edwards. That was supposed to be the big story in the software business. Then Conway's customers started talking about the Oracle offer and whether they should postpone purchases until things settled down. Even after the PeopleSoft board concluded there would be antitrust problems with an Oracle takeover, Ellison was still pressing the deal on PeopleSoft shareholders. By the end of the week, PeopleSoft...
Ironically enough, it was PeopleSoft's Conway who first suggested to Ellison last year that the applications side of their businesses should merge. The discussions were cordial--hard to imagine after a week in which Conway compared Ellison to Genghis Khan--and the two companies exchanged fact-finding teams. The sticking point: who would run the joint business. "He said, 'I'm your man,'" says Ellison. "Conway didn't see a single antitrust problem then." (Conway does not dispute this account of the meeting but points out that discussions were over in a matter of hours.) After negotiations broke down...
After his fruitless talks with Ellison, Conway kept looking for a partner, and found it in J.D. Edwards. Their businesses were widely regarded as complementary. PeopleSoft tended to sell to high-end firms, J.D. Edwards to the middle market. Four days later, Ellison announced his competing bid for PeopleSoft. Coincidence? Conway thinks not. "If we were ever looking for confirmation that the J.D. Edwards merger was right for the industry," he says, "Larry provided...
Some of those customers are not happy with the idea of being traded like poker chips. Conway says he has received calls of support from 26 of his customers' chief information officers. The majority, he claims, were indignant enough to consider switching from Oracle Database to its Microsoft and IBM rivals. The idea of Oracle splashing out $5.1 billion on PeopleSoft also unnerved investment analysts at Moody's, who downgraded the firm's outlook for Oracle from stable to negative; however, few investors followed suit. Oracle's stock rose to $13.48 at the end of the week, up 3% over...
...spat between Ellison and Conway would be little more than an amusing sideshow if not for two things. First, it shows the reach of Ellison's influence. He has been CEO of Oracle since 1977--several lifetimes in the tech industry--and a coterie of former Oracle executives, dubbed the Little Larrys, has fanned out to rule much of the business-software world. Conway, Siebel and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. com, a company that lets clients hire out its enterprise applications, are members of the Oracle alumni e-mail list. There is no love lost for Ellison among them...