PeopleSoft is suing to stop Oracle acquiring it. When PeopleSoft amended its complaint on August 12, the company said it had new information concerning Oracle’s deliberate campaign to mislead PeopleSoft customers about Oracle’s plans to support PeopleSoft products.

However, significant parts of the complaint were redacted, and the content of the censored portions only emerged late Tuesday.

The full filing, a copy of which has been seen by ComputerWire, includes extracts from internal Oracle e-mails that PeopleSoft says reveal Oracle’s hidden agenda when it launched the hostile takeover bid.

An extract of an e-mail from one Oracle employee, sent the day after Oracle bid for PeopleSoft, is quoted as stating: We’ve certainly wounded PSFT… Even if we don’t end up closing the deal, this is going to take PSFT time to recover.

Another section quotes an internal e-mail from Safra Catz, an Oracle executive VP, also sent the day after Oracle announced its offer that said: Though we really won’t be continuing their product line or combining operations, there will no doubt be challenges.

Oracle spokesperson Jim Finn said PeopleSoft’s complaint, which also describes a campaign by Oracle to influence analysts and the media, is rife with comments taken out of context as PeopleSoft continues to litigate the issue in the court of public opinion.

Oracle is making the full text of one of the e-mails available to show what it claimed is the proper context. The quotes in the complaint are, literally speaking, out of context, but whether the meaning is significantly altered by being seen in context is unclear.

The full Catz e-mail, seen by ComputerWire, also includes a list of talking points, one of which outlines Oracle’s plan to continue to support PeopleSoft products beyond the time PeopleSoft (referred to as Pepper) plans to discontinue support.

Oracle will continue to support Pepper products, the Catz e-mail reads. Oracle will extend support on Pepper version 7 beyond the Pepper desupport [sic] date of December 2003 giving Pepper customers more time to migrate their installations.

It was not immediately clear which employees Catz’s e-mail was sent to and for what purpose, or what talking point means. Oracle would not release any of the other e-mails in full. An Oracle spokesperson could not comment.

Meanwhile, away from the courts, PeopleSoft has renewed the money-back guarantee it put in place in June as part of its efforts to persuade wavering customers to close deals before the quarter end.

The new offer applies to the current quarter and to PeopleSoft and JD Edwards products, and is similar to the previous one in that it offers customers a refund payment equal to two to five times the cost of license fees if PeopleSoft is acquired.

The buyer would be responsible for the repayment, which would further raise the cost of a successful purchase on the part of Oracle. Oracle, however, has said that its product support plan would not activate the refund offer.

The price has already risen twice, once at a result of Oracle raising its bid from $16 to $19.50 per share, and again following PeopleSoft’s successful acquisition of JD Edwards. Although Oracle did not increase the price it was offering per share, it had to be prepared to pay a further $1.2bn because the transaction put an additional 53 million shares on the market, sending the estimated price up from $6.3bn to $7.5bn.

Source: Computerwire