The Hindu : Business : Who will be last man standing?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Dec 15, 2004

Business

Business

Who will be last man standing?

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, DEC. 14. This is beginning to sound like the early chapters of Agatha Christie's classic novel "Ten Little Indians,' where the line up of the living gets truncated at every turn, mirroring the nursery rhyme which ended: "And then there were none.''

Once there were half a dozen leading enterprise software companies, worldwide. Then they began to swallow each other. Ingres, a robust name for relational data base, is now a Computer Associates open source offering. Eighteen months ago, PeopleSoft acquired J.D. Edwards, a leader in collaborative software that allowed users to electronically manage their business process.

That made PeopleSoft very attractive to another big player: Oracle. Why? This was the logic: Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company, offering software and services that let organizations get accurate information from their business systems.

The company, which began with the relational data base product bearing its name, derives 80 per cent of its sales from databases. PeopleSoft, on the other hand, is a leading provider of application software for the real-time enterprise with a heavy focus on human resources. Its integrated applications include Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Human Capital Management, which will allow Oracle a foothold in the human resource applications market, not least into PeopleSoft's 13,000-strong customer base.

After a long drawn out and mostly hostile courtship ( if that is not a contradiction in terms), PeoplSoft has accepted Oracle's offer at $26. 50 a share on Monday. Playing hard to get paid off: the offer was, a good $10 above Oracle's initial number.

The shotgun wedding will be consummated in January — and that will leave pretty much only two players at the top end of the enterprise software arena: The Oracle-PeopleSoft combo and the German SAP. Now customers' choice in India as elsewhere, is further reduced to an either-or situation. Maybe it may be too premature to ask: Who will be Last Man Standing?

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