Commitment to acquired brands comes as a relief

New Oracle user relieved by promise of continued support and IBM certification

For many PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel customers, the Oracle OpenWorld conference last week offered some welcome relief about the future of their IT support contracts.

The software maker has promised lifetime support guarantees on all the brands it has acquired.

Phil Walton, global information systems director for Spirent Communications, a provider of high-tech testing and monitoring services for companies such as BT, and a long-term user of JD Edwards and Siebel software, was one of the companies welcoming the news.

‘We had been concerned that the support resources that PeopleSoft was providing for JD Edwards would be lost, so we were very pleased to hear about that,’ he said.
Walton believes that Oracle’s serial acquisitions could help Spirent cut its IT costs in the long term.

‘One of the biggest cost drivers to our business is integration between different solutions. The more systems that Oracle buys, such as Siebel, the less effort Spirent will have to make plugging different bits of software together,’ he said.

‘The other thing that worried us about the PeopleSoft acquisition was the whole relationship with IBM. We have really committed ourselves to WebSphere as
our portal framework. What I’ve heard this week is that Oracle is very committed to continuing to work with IBM, which is a relief.’

Over the past years, Walton has watched as JD Edwards was purchased first by PeopleSoft and then later by Oracle.

‘I’m getting to the point where I don’t worry about it; something always seems to work out eventually,’ he said.