XplanaZine

Oracle has made a formal bid to buy PeopleSoft and it’s a move that should come as no real surprise to anyone.
Oracle is the leading database software company in the world, but has struggled to make inroads into the enterprise application arena. It has applications but has found it difficult to persuade people to interest buyers. Everyone, it seems, insists on seeing Oracle as only a database company. The solution? Buy a leading application provider that already has considerable market share and can provide the credibility Oracle needs to enter the game.
PeopleSoft, on the other hand, finds itself in a familiar and unenviable position. It is a successful application provider that wants to grow but, realistically needs a partner to compete with its biggest competitors. In the short term, it can benefit from acquiring companies such as J.D. Edwards, but in order to mount a real charge at SAP,, the worldwide leader in HR/Financial/CRM software, PeopleSoft will need help. Oracle provides what PeopleSoft would need, but is an unwanted suitor. Still, many analysts feel that PeopleSoft will find it difficult to prevent a buyout in the long run. Should it succeed in its bid, Oracle has said that it will eventually integrate PeopleSoft software into its own brand and cease to market and sell products under the PeopleSoft brand.
This is mildly interesting for educational institutions as many larger universities have adopted PeopleSoft for administrative computing. Some are even taking advantage of the PeopleSoft-BlackBoard integration modules available that allow campuses to have full integrated information, accounting, and courseware systems.
More interesting is how this type of “integration” might play out for other companies. What would it mean, for example, if BlackBoard acquired WebCT? We should accept the fact that a merger between these two companies is a real and logical possibility. They are the leading CMS vendors in North America. They each have strengths and weaknesses but, rhetoric aside, are similar in their philosophies and trajectories. Both have found corporate partners but in order to become truly dominant and profitable in the portal/learning worlds, they could use some much-needed synergy. So, instead of competing, what if the two companies combined their products, kept one sales force, and merged (and tightened) their administrative and development offices? The result could be a unified, dominant provider of e-learning solutions for university and corporate clients. By combining their revenues and reducing their overall workforce, the resulting company could become highly profitable in a short period of time. Obviously, I am ready to accept this possibility.
As a former university IT administrator the option actually sounds attractive — it would simplify things enormously. As an online course developer, I could only hope that the combined resources of the two companies would result in an improved flexibility and innovation for course management. In my opinion, such mergers are inevitable in the business and software worlds (what about Macromedia being acquired by Microsoft?), and should never be viewed negatively. The open source movement has already provided us with fine options for e-learning, and if a BlackBoard-WebCT merger should make things worse, other companies will come along and challenge.
These possibilities do, however, remind us of the importance of emerging data standards and the commitment to reusable objects in learning. If these become our real priorities, we will likely find that forced evolutions and integrations of software die to company mergers (hostile or otherwise) will affect us less than we might think.