When database and enterprise software giant Oracle announced that it had finally won its battle to buy rival PeopleSoft for $11.1bn, its acquisition hunger was hardly sated.
Over the next several months, Oracle's rivals, most notably SAP, used the massive acquisition as a central marketing tool. They said Oracle would need years to get its operations back in order, and that the entity created through the deal would be a bloated company with too many different products. Industry analysts agreed that in the period of uncertainty created by the megamerger, Oracle's competitors would be likely to siphon away valuable customers.
Flip forward to late June, and Oracle delivered fourth-quarter earnings that widely surpassed Wall Street estimates, driven by sales of the business applications it was supposed to struggle with. The result stands as a resounding victory in perception for Oracle and for Charles Phillips, the company co-president tasked with keeping the software maker's operations on track.
Phillips recently sat down with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com to discuss the curving path his company recently travelled and its expanded road map for the future. In addition to detailing Oracle's plans, the executive said rumours of a potential departure are as baseless as the market's dire predictions regarding his current employer.
Q: There was so much noise in the market regarding the extent to which Oracle would struggle to retain customers and win new deals while it was working too integrate PeopleSoft. With the better-than-expected applications performance in the fourth quarter Oracle reported last month, is it fair to say that those perceptions were disproved?
Yes. I think the perception that there would be customer defections was more a wish by SAP, and maybe smacks of little bit of desperation [since they] spend more time talking about us than about [their] own strategy. But we have not seen that happen and, in fact, the maximum period of uncertainty probably would have been last December, on the first day we announced the deal.
I think what people are forgetting is, as long as you believe that all applications will have to migrate to some service-oriented architecture, that means all applications will have to change and anything that has been written in the last 10 years is going to have to change. So SAP will have to change their architecture as well.
