Oracle is going to make life easy for the PeopleTools product managers if they keep acquiring all of the 3rd party products that PeopleTools embeds :-)

Joking aside, an Oracle acquisition of BEA would mostly be a non-event for PeopleSoft customers. Sure, there's potential for some of BEA's middleware to become of the Fusion stack down the road, but purely for the purposes of running current PeopleSoft applications, nothing would be likely to change (except for the logos on the installers!).

As was the case with Crystal and other 3rd party products that PeopleSoft used, there were long term contracts in place for Tuxedo and WebLogic. These contracts always included language that dealt with acquisition scenarios, including scenarios where the acquirer was hostile to PeopleSoft. Fairly standard stuff in terms of protecting yourself from the unexpected (or maybe these days you'd call it the expected).

Of course, even long term contracts do come to an end. Since Oracle is going to support PeopleSoft for some lengthy period of time, how to handle 3rd party products over the long haul still is an interesting question. When a contract comes up for renewal, there's always the chance that negotiations won't go well. As a product manager, you always have to have a backup plan ready in case you suddenly need a replacement.

I had an interesting lesson in this one time when my boss at the time, Peter Gassner, drug me and Tressa Novak, who ran the Business Development group for PeopleTools, into an extraordinarily long meeting with a vendor that believed that they had PeopleSoft over a barrel at contract renegotiation time. I won't mention their name (but I will tell you that they haven't been mentioned at all on this blog), but they brought in a few high level folks that had barely contained smiles on their faces. The anticipation of a giant payday must have been pretty strong.

The next few hours were spent with Peter slowly, but surely, convincing them of exactly how PeopleSoft could move away from being dependent on them, what the effort would take, what the problems would be and how they would be dealt with, etc. It was interesting to watch their smiles very slowly turn into frowns as they realized that they didn't have quite the leverage that they thought they did. They left the meeting room without the smiles, but still as a PeopleSoft partner. Without the detailed backup plan in place, then the negotiations surely would have turned out much differently (probably with them making Sales Club for the next few years!)

It would have been pretty funny if we had just said that we were going to buy them instead :-)

As for backup plans for WebLogic and Tuxedo, those are taken care of as well. Replacing WebLogic if absolutely necessary would be easy to do since Oracle's own J2EE server as well as IBM WebSphere are already supported choices.

Tuxedo would definitely be a harder effort, but PeopleSoft actually doesn't leverage Tuxedo so deeply that it wouldn't be possible. In fact, most of what PeopleSoft gets from Tuxedo is also supplied by leading J2EE containers these days. The bigger headache is that the PeopleTools code that runs as Tuxedo services is written in C++. Using JNI to make that work inside of a J2EE container wouldn't be pretty, but PeopleTools already uses JNI extensively for all of the Java/PeopleCode integration. Not a pretty solution, but as a backup plan, it's manageable. Certainly more so than porting all of the PeopleTools C++ code to Java, which was bandied about on a few different occasions.

Labels: 2007, Business, History