Party like it's 1999
Is it 1999 again? With big mergers occuring daily in the tech environment, one might think so. I guess the same rationale for the Peoplesoft aquisition of JD Edwards applies to Oracle taking over Peoplesoft as well. But, I'm not so sure this is a sign of strength for any of the firms involved - the market for enterprise apps is still tepid. Also, while it seemed to me that Peoplesoft and JD Edwards had pretty distinct customer bases, so you could make the case that Peoplesoft was basically buying customers, it seems that Oracle and Peoplesoft have the same type of customers. Might make the merger less risky, but doesn't really broaden the customer base by much.
On an interesting entreprenurial note, I read in a little side blurb in Intelligent Enterprise that Savantis, a company that provides a switch which creates a layer of indirection between database servers and clients, was started with an idea developed by market research instead of a product idea. I guess they just asked CIOs what problems they encountered and developed the database switching idea based on the responses. It almost always seems that technology companies are spawned product first with market research coming relatively late in the game - maybe there is something to be learned here? After all, they did get $12M of VC money for the company... (Of course, that goes totally against the grain of how you should start a software company ;-)