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To: Michael Young who wrote (245)	9/13/2000 8:09:48 PM
From: Michael Young	Respond to of 499

Suited-up, ready to rumble: When PeopleSoft's chief executive describes rival Oracle, he sounds like a pro wrestler Simon Avery 08/21/2000 National Post PLEASANTON, Calif. - Craig Conway is a long way from grabbing the title of world's richest man, but the president and chief executive of PeopleSoft Corp. has his sights set on beating the man who has worn that mantle for some of this year. Mr. Conway is ready to engage Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief executive of Oracle Corp., in a no-holds barred fight for leadership in the multibillion-dollar market for software that helps companies turn into e-businesses. The market -- which includes software to automate and manage everything from human resources and financial operations to customer-relations and manufacturing -- will be worth a whopping US$78-billion by 2004, according to AMR Research Inc. The players include Germany's SAP AG, California-based Oracle and PeopleSoft, and a host of smaller firms specializing in various market segments. PeopleSoft is playing catchup to Oracle, which released its latest application suite, Oracle 11i, this summer. But PeopleSoft plans on making a splash when its Internet-enabled package called PeopleSoft 8 ships next month. The product took two years and nearly US$500-million to develop. "I describe PeopleSoft now as at base camp, and we're ready now for an attack on the summit," Mr. Conway said. "We have the opportunity to become the number one company." Not everyone takes this claim seriously. PeopleSoft, after all, did US$1.4-billion in business last year, compared with Oracle's US$10.1 billion. But Mr. Conway is aggressively pumping out his message, recently hammering away at financial analysts, trying to get them to raise their earnings expectations for the company next year by 50%, to between US60 cents and US65 cents a share. A recent Friday visit to PeopleSoft headquarters found Mr. Conway and his executive team bucking the casual dress code that permeates the industry every day of the week. Rather than khakis and golf shirts, his team wears dark suits, white shirts and ties. "It's part of our new message about being professional, accountable and aggressive," Mr. Conway explained. He compared PeopleSoft's position today to Oracle's 10 years ago, when Oracle began its rapid rise to become the second-largest software company in the world. Mr. Conway was once Oracle's executive vice-president. He joined PeopleSoft last year, at the time comparing the faltering company to a car-crash victim lying dazed on the side of the road. Its founder and CEO, David Duffield, had resigned amid slowing sales and an unfocused Internet strategy. PeopleSoft has now rewritten its 108 client-server software products to be Internet-based, and added 59 new applications. Mr. Conway's immediate goal is to inflate PeopleSoft into a US$5-billion company within a few years. A later target of US$10-billion is not out of the question, he said. The driver of this growth will be PeopleSoft 8 , which is written in XML, the new lingua franca of the Internet. The XML base makes applications easier to use, because every screen now looks like a Web page rather than a Microsoft Windows application. It also positions the product to become a bridge between companies trading information with each other in the future over Internet-type exchanges. Mr. Conway said Oracle hasn't made the full transition to Internet-based products yet, a claim Oracle flatly rejects. Neither company speaks kindly of the other. In fact, Mr. Conway sounds more like a professional wrestler rather than a CEO when talking about his former employer. "Oracle is a sociopathic company. They've been lying for so long that they can no longer tell the difference between truth and lies, between fact and fiction," he said. "The tech industry has been dumbed down from an integrity point of view by companies like Oracle." The technology industry has for some time accused Oracle of being heavy-handed. Recently, the company was caught offering cleaning staff cash for trash in a spying campaign against Microsoft Corp. Mr. Conway said he plans to use Oracle's bad publicity and a recent management shakeup at the company to PeopleSoft's advantage. But Oracle dismisses Mr. Conway's remarks as cheapshots at a former employer, and it notes that Oracle 11i already has 1,300 customers, while PeopleSoft 8 isn't yet on store shelves. "Craig's comments should be taken with a grain of salt," said an Oracle official. "He left Oracle over eight years ago, way before the Internet had taken hold. Oracle is a very different company. We did catch the Internet wave early, because we had a vision, and we have consistently delivered on it."