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Oracle Raises Its Final Bid for PeopleSoft

Oracle has given PeopleSoft what seems like its millionth, but what will actually be its last, offer to acquire the company: $24 a share, or $9.2 billion. That price is where PeopleSoft stock was trading in early January 2004, and it represents about a 19 percent premium compared with where the companies stock has been trading recently. Larry Ellison said that this price is final and non-negotiable, but that other merger terms are subject to negotiation. Oracle is giving PeopleSoft's board of directors until November 19 to recommend that shareholders accept the deal. Oracle needs to have shareholders tender more than 50 percent of the company's shares to do the deal, and the company says that if it does not get that level of support from PeopleSoft's shareholders, it will walk away.

MAPICS Says Spending Is Picking Up Among Manufacturers

ERP software maker MAPICS, which sells into the OS/400 and Windows markets, finished its fiscal 2004 with a pretty good fourth quarter. Overall revenues were down 3 percent in the quarter to just under $44 million, but because of past restructurings and cost cuts, MAPICS was able to book a net income of $4.1 million, a significant improvement over $893,000 profit in last year's fourth quarter. The company said that software license sales were up 5 percent, to $12.7 million. For the fiscal year 2004, MAPICS had total sales of $172.8 million, up 7 percent, with net income of $10.7 million, up by a factor of 2.5 and resulting in a net income of 45 cents a share. For fiscal 2005, MAPICS is not projecting revenues, but says that it expects net earnings for the full year in the range of 50 to 55 cents a share.

"Customer interest and, more importantly, capital spending in the manufacturing sector seem to be on upswing," said MAPICS CEO Dick Cook in a statement accompanying the financial results, "particularly in certain emerging markets." Cook said that MAPICS was benefiting from repositioning of products in its North American channel during fiscal 2004, and that, during fiscal 2005, it would rejigger its international channel. At the same time, the company is revving up its SyteLine ERP suite for Windows servers with .NET programming technologies.

Global Software Buys GBA Systems

Global Software, which has a business focused on selling data analytics software for ERP packages that are popularly used on OS/400 servers, has acquired GBA Systems, a vendor of fixed asset, project management, lease accounting, and school safety application software suites that run on OS/400 and Windows servers. Both companies are located in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina, and Global Software has been a distributor of GBA's software for 17 years. GBA was founded in 1975 and has been writing software for IBM's various midrange servers since that time. More than half of the company's installed base of 280 customers have been using the company's software for over a decade.

With the acquisition, Global Software has nearly doubled its customer base to 700. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

IDC Plots Steady Software Sales Through 2008

The market for packaged software products, including operating systems, middleware, and applications, is growing again after a decline last year, according to IDC. The market researcher is predicting that worldwide software sales (including perpetual software licenses as well as software rented on an annual or a monthly basis) will rise by 5.1 percent this year, to $189 billion. IDC says further that the compound annual growth rate for worldwide software sales between 2003 and 2008 will be about 6.9 percent, which suggests that the market growth will accelerate, pushing sales to about $250 billion or so.

While this seems good, it is only so by recent comparison. "Even though the software industry is recovering from its first-ever decline, the double-digit growth rates experienced in the last decade will not return in the foreseeable future," said Anthony Picardi, senior vice president of global software research at IDC, who put together the software forecast. "Issues of complexity, security, and software quality, as well as a myriad of changing macroeconomic factors, all pose continuing challenges to industry growth."

In 2003, one third of total software sales were to five vendors: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Computer Associates. As for trends, IDC says that the Linux platform gave it seventh-place in the software market, well behind various Unixes, Windows, and MVS mainframe platforms. However, IDC expects that, by 2008, the Linux platform will move into the fourth position. As is the case in other parts of the IT industry, North America is and will remain the largest software market, and Asia and Central Europe are the fastest growing software markets.

META Group Says IT Salaries Will Be Up 10% to 15% Through 2007

Being a human resources manager or an IT manager is rarely an easy job. In bad economic times, you have to lay off people and deal with tight budgets, and in the good times you have to cope with fast-rising salaries and employee turnover. The analysts at IT consultancy META Group say that they expect IT salaries to increase by 10 to 15 percent in the next three years, and will represent approximately 55 percent of the typical IT budget by 2007.

META says the economy is going to pick up in the next year, and IT shops will be hard-pressed to keep their best talent from seeking out "greener pastures" where they can get better pay and new challenges. META suggests that now is the time to add performance-based compensation packages, as well as implement employee morale, recruitment, and retention programs (including key things like flex time and telecommuting options). Application developers, security specialists, and network administrators are the hardest IT employees to hold on to, according to META.

Jacada's Sales Flat in Third Quarter, Losses Shrink

Middleware software maker Jacada, one of the few public companies in the midrange application tool market that also derives a large portion of its sales from the OS/400 market, reported financial results for the third quarter of 2004 last week. Sales for the quarter were $4.9 million, the same level of sales Jacada had for the second quarter of this year, but were down 8 percent from last year's third quarter. Jacada said that it sold $1.4 million in software in the third quarter of 2004, up 7 percent from the second quarter of 2004, but down 39 percent from this time last year. Service and maintenance sales in the third quarter were $3.5 million, the same as in the second quarter of this year, and up 17 percent from last year. Though Jacada still managed to post $3.7 million in gross profits, the company posted a net loss of $1.1 million, or 6 cents a share. That was an improvement over the $1.9 million net loss Jacada posted in the second quarter of this year. This time last year, Jacada's revenues were larger, and it had a net loss of $600,000, or 3 cents a share.

The company ended the quarter with $38 million in cash, which gives it plenty of breathing room as it ramps up its new Jacada Fusion, which has yet to contribute to sales. Jacada Fusion is an amalgam of the company's WinFuse and Integrator middleware, which are designed to front-end legacy Windows and OS/400 applications, respectively.

NetManage Has a Better Third Quarter, Too