Ok, finally it seems that there might be a ray of hope for
Oracle if it shows some positive trends in its earnings as this article says:
Oracle is expected to show a return to underlying growth in its applications software business when it
reports its earnings on Monday, ending a troubled period that followed its contested takeover of PeopleSoft.
I am amazed at the lack of clarity in Oracle's think-tanks - they
have made it so much easier for SAP to succeed by buying out Peoplesoft and Siebel that now there seems no doubt in my mind
that the future is set for only one player to get substantial market - SAP! If Ellison still had some smarts left - he
would leave PPSFT alone and just add more functionality rather than tinker with it to "merge" it into Oracle
products. But you never know!
“SAP has definitely benefited from what happened with the
PeopleSoft merger, especially the uncertainty around that,� John Wookey, the executive in charge of Oracle’s applications
business, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “There was an 18-month discombobulation in the marketplace. It
hurt PeopleSoft; it hurt us.�
That has helped SAP gain ground in Oracle’s home market, with the German
company’s sales in the US rising at an average annualised rate of 30 per cent since late 2002, said Bill McDermott, head of
SAP Americas. “[Oracle’s] loss is directly comparable to our gains,� he added. Mr Wookey blamed Oracle’s problems in
applications partly on its failure to convince customers at the time of the PeopleSoft acquisition about the effectiveness of
Project Fusion, its plan to merge the companies’ products.
“The uncertainty which I think SAP really
capitalised [on] over the past year in terms of exactly what is the plan for Fusion, is starting to go away,� he