The PeopleSoft Divide

Is Oracle's desire to consume PeopleSoft a good thing or bad thing in the mind of the average BI practitioner? Well, flip a coin.

Our most recent Business Intelligence Pipeline poll generated results that are reminiscent of the 50-50, down-the-middle "Red State, Blue State" divide that this year's political pundits love blabbering about so much. We asked you how it would impact your IT organization if Oracle prevailed in its no-holds-barred attempt to acquire enterprise applications rival PeopleSoft.

You could say the readership is of two minds.

The portions of readers who either a) expect no impact at all, or b) use PeopleSoft tools and therefore foresee a possibly serious impact, were roughly even at 35% and 30%, respectively. The remaining third of readers split down the middle as to whether an acquisition of PeopleSoft would be a good or bad thing: 17% said a successful bid would be good for the enterprise software market, and 17% said it would be bad.

Albeit anecdotally and unscientifically, our poll indicates that the Oracle-PeopleSoft question has divided BI specialists as starkly and evenly as it has everybody else following the case. And that doesn't come as a surprise, since big enterprise applications such as those made by Oracle and PeopleSoft often generate the very data that makes business intelligence possible in the first place.

Too bad our site polling tool doesn't let me ask respondents which states they're from, or I might be able to generate some supercool geographical cross-tabs. As a bit of a data analysis junkie myself, I'd love to see them.