Retention On Track

Oracle has retained 99% of the PeopleSoft developers and technical-support staff that it made job offers to Jan. 14 in the wake of the takeover, said John Wookey, the executive charged with creating the next version of Oracle enterprise applications.

Retaining technical staff was cited by 23% of Oracle or PeopleSoft customers as the one thing Oracle must get right to make the deal work, according to a December InformationWeek survey of 455 IT managers. Only service and support was cited more often by respondents to the survey.

Wookey, Oracle's senior VP for applications development, said last week that Oracle's development teams have begun mapping out the architecture of the "Fusion" generation of applications that will merge Oracle's acquired PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards software with its own, and the California teams are on track to produce the Java-based applications in 2007 and 2008 as planned.