Putting on happy faces in Larry's world

Oracle's Larry Ellison is facing a "poison pill" in his fight to take over PeopleSoft.

Oracle's annual Open World user conference in San Francisco last week lived up to its reputation as the IT industry's liveliest dogfight, despite a lack of real meat.

Open World is where heavyweight industry competitors such as Dell's Michael Dell, Sun's Scott McNealy, Carly Fiorina from Hewlett Packard, and Oracle supremo Larry Ellison pitch their visions of the future.

"Am I still your friend?" they ask Larry. "Do you love me?"

Most will be told they are too fat, too slow, too dumb, too expensive, too demanding to win Larry's love.

Jealousy, bitterness and resentment are the outcome, but everyone has to put on a happy face and keep working together, because there is so much money to be made.

There is also the small detail that even if Ellison says the world should buy commodity servers from Dell, load up a Linux operating system and get the rest of what they need from his company, customers continue to build systems with technology from Sun, HP, even IBM and Microsoft.

The first order of business, though, was to talk up Oracle's applications, which have always been a distant second at Open World to the database and infrastructure technology.

The hostile (or "unsolicited", as Oracle president Charles Phillips prefers to call it) takeover of applications rival PeopleSoft has entered its final stages and 60 per cent of PeopleSoft shareholders have accepted Oracle's "last and best offer" of US$24.

The companies go to court in Delaware this week to argue whether PeopleSoft can invoke a "poison pill" under which it will create millions of new shares to keep Oracle at bay.

Ellison reassured PeopleSoft customers, most of whom use Oracle's database to manage their information, that Oracle would "over-support" them.

If the deal goes through, it will finish PeopleSoft 9, which is under development.

"After PeopleSoft 9 and the next generation of Oracle [applications], we will build a successor product to PeopleSoft and Oracle so PeopleSoft customers, when they do their upgrade, will get a dramatically better product," Ellison said.

Phillips told the 25,000 customers and partners at the conference that applications and infrastructure technology were coming together as the industry looked for new ways of putting systems together to deliver more useful information and applications at lower cost.

He said organisations wanted "information-age applications" that centralised all data in a single store and delivered timely, consistent, complete and globally accessible information - such as Oracle's E-business Suite.

Phillips said that because most organisations used information from multiple systems, Oracle was creating a new "data hub" that would be a live repository of data from legacy systems or applications from competitors such as SAP and Siebel.

That meant applications could change, but the data would remain consistent.

 

Phillips said Oracle was teaming with Intel, Dell, Novell (which now owns Suse Linux) and Red Hat.

The news that Oracle's version of the future does not include HP did not please Fiorina, the next speaker. She was selling her vision of the same thing, and said customers could get the same results with HP gear - including its HP-UX operating system.

Phillips gave a sort of apology later, saying the announcement was about timing, and it was not that HP and Sun would not be involved.

 

Sun's McNealy is used to being snubbed, and incorporated it into the stand-up comedy routine that constituted his speech.

Displaying a photo of himself with Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, he told Ellison: "We have friends, too. You hang out with Michael [Dell], I'll hang out with Steve."

He said Sun was going to make its Solaris operating system free next year as part of its plan to turn IT into a service - a move that will challenge Oracle's Linux push.

* Gifford travelled to San Francisco courtesy of Oracle.