...it could have been worse than what we got under PeopleSoft," Nicholson said. "It hasn't gotten better, however."
Customers like Nicholson, however, remain undecided whether they will ultimately migrate to Oracle's Fusion offering.
"Fusion is not expected to be done until 2008, and then customers will evaluate the software through 2010. They're taking a wait-and-see approach," Richardson said.
Rolling out the red carpet
As the merger came to a close last year, Oracle and archrival SAP launched programs to aggressively woo each other's customers.
SAP kicked off its Safe Passage Program shortly after Oracle closed its deal last year, and expanded it in April, offering customers financial incentives to dump any PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications they were concurrently running on their systems. PeopleSoft acquired JD Edwards before its merger with Oracle.
In June, Oracle countered with its Oracle Fusion for SAP, or "OFF SAP", program. Like SAP, Oracle offered financial incentives to SAP customers to switch.
Over the past year, SAP has lured 40 customers away from Oracle under its Safe Passage program, said Bill Wohl, a SAP spokesman, including luggage manufacturer Samsonite, which had been using technology from JD Edwards. Other companies that switched included Waste Management and European companies Veka and Yazaki Europe.
"No one believed a flood of customers would move over [to SAP] in the first year... We expect those decisions will take some time," Wohl said. "Instead, we initially focused on customers most likely to convert, and that included PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers who were also running SAP."
SAP has engaged in other offensive moves against Oracle beyond its Safe Passage program, including the acquisition of third-party PeopleSoft support company TomorrowNow within two weeks of Oracle closing its PeopleSoft merger. TomorrowNow, which has been offering support to PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers since 2002, has more than 100 active customers, the bulk of whom signed on after the merger closed, TomorrowNow chief executive Andrew Nelson said.
For its part, Oracle says it has competed successfully against SAP in winning new customers.
"We are seeing companies consolidate software vendors and standardise on Oracle," Bob Wynne, an Oracle spokesman, said in a statement. "Companies such as Usina Nova America and Group Voyagers have recently replaced SAP and standardised on Oracle applications. Additionally, new customers such as Gianni Versace, Ingersoll-Rand and Welch Foods continue to select Oracle applications over SAP."
Oracle's $11.1bn merger has yet to lift its languishing stock, which has remained virtually flat over the past three years and has underperformed both SAP and the Nasdaq composite index in the past year.
And conflicting reports have emerged over Oracle's applications licensing revenue.
Applications licence revenue, an area Oracle has...
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