The Department of Justice is collecting a $98.5 million settlement from Oracle, after PeopleSoft was found guilty of hiking up its prices for government contracts from 1997 until 2005. James A. Hicks, a former PeopleSoft employee, will get $17.73 million for his role in outing his company.

PeopleSoft negotiated the government contract under the General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program, which allows for blanket purchasing for myriad government institutions. Later, the Department of Justice accused PeopleSoft of “defective pricing disclosures” after it learned that at least one customer in the Nineties was given discounts of up to 74 percent.

“GSA’s Multiple Award Schedule program serves vendors and government purchasers by eliminating red tape while insuring that government agencies get a fair deal for the American taxpayer’s procurement dollars,” said Deputy Attorney General General Paul J. McNulty.

“The program works well when vendors follow the disclosure rules and provide GSA with the information it needs to negotiate good prices for government purchasers. This agreement demonstrates the Department’s determination to hold vendors accountable for abusing GSA’s trust and damaging its programs.”

The payment is the largest ever obtained by the United States in a civil settlement under the False Claims Act involving the GSA’s MAS program. Under the program, vendors agree to disclose their commercial pricing policies in exchange for access to hundreds of government purchasers. GSA regulations require vendors to disclose “current, accurate and complete” commercial pricing policies during negotiations.

“All companies that want to avoid their disclosure obligations while selling products to the United States government are on notice today that we will use the False Claims Act and all other civil legal tools at our disposal to fight fraud and abuse,” said Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler.

The lawsuit alleged that PeopleSoft failed to disclose the true nature of its multiple product discounting practice, a program that afforded buyers incrementally steeper discounts off list prices or software products based on the number of products purchased at one time. As a result, says the DOJ, the government overpaid for software and related maintenance.

“Because PeopleSoft did not give GSA accurate pricing information, it negotiated higher prices for its products and services than it would have obtained if GSA had known the truth,” said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein.

GSA Inspector General Brian D. Miller joined the government dog pile. “GSA’s MAS contracting program – with sales of well over $30 billion in the last fiscal year – depends on vendors’ honesty in negotiations.

“PeopleSoft misled and overcharged the government for years. Without the auditors’ specialized training and years of experience examining federal contracting arrangements, the wool would have remained over everyone’s eyes and the taxpayers might have again taken a fleecing.”

The case was filed under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act by Hicks in the US District Court for the District of Maryland. Under the whistleblowers provisions, private citizens known as “relators” can sue on behalf of the government to recover federal funds that were obtained by false or fraudulent claims, and receive a portion of the proceeds.

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The company says that the move to Internet Protocol (IP) services and 3G data networks has built a need for communications service providers to be more flexible in how they handle their customer and order management processes. The PeopleSoft offering aims to help lower the cost of service and time to market for new products.

Among the offerings is also support for wireless markets, mobile number portability, and lost or stolen wireless handsets.

Adding to Oracle‘s core CRM suite and to the financial services capabilities, the release includes sample processes for Financial Account Creation, Lead and Referral Management, as well as Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) allowing for content currently available within the PeopleSoft portal to be visible by a third party portal.

Some of the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 enhancements include an actionable 360-degree view of customers with a work list and auto-save of recent searches, an auto- population of commonly typed text using hotkeys, and a bulk service management for order capture, calendaring enhancements, lead import performance improvements, and mobile sales support for Intellisync Mobile Suite (IMS) architecture.

“As with the other product releases within PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 incorporates customers’ requests for improved usability,” said Oracle Vice President of PeopleSoft Enterprise Application Strategy John Webb. “The release includes standards-based technology to ensure our customers may derive continued value from their technology investments without surrendering the IT agility required to capture new opportunities as they arise.”

The new functionalities are intended to improve usability and productivity by streamlining processes through reduced clicks and page transfers. The release is a boon to DePaul University’s productivity, says DePaul’s CRM Craft Team leader Audrey Bledsoe.

“PeopleSoft CRM 9.0 will alleviate the need for several of the DePaul specific customizations and integration points we’ve developed in our CRM 8.9 environment. We are looking for ways to decrease maintenance time.”

Oracle provided this list of enhancements for integration and reporting:

Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g Certification

New release of JDE announced. Metalink user names changing to e-mail addresses. Oracle Applications License growth exceeds that of SAP and is Oracle looking to create their own Linux distro?

• .. SAOUG Newsletter..
• Applications Unlimited
• Compiere introduces open source collaboration management (Computer Weekly)
• Metalink Shakedown
• Oracle Announces New Release of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
• Oracle Grows Faster Than SAP
• Oracle Leads Next-Generation Web 2.0 Application Development With Contributions to Open Source Community (PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance)
• Oracle Seeing Red Hat (TheStreet.com)
• Oracle Vows To Support PeopleSoft Expense App (Business Travel News)
• Process Management in Release 12

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Richard Byrom is the founder and author of OracleAppsBlog, which documents the daily experiences and learnings of Oracle Applications Consultants and Implementors. He is also an Oracle Applications Consultant, Speaker and Author.

Of the four purchases made by Oracle this year, the $10.6 billion USD acquisition of PeopleSoft was the biggest. And it seems to have paid off for the company.

Sales of databases and business applications have maneuvered Oracle into better position to compete with SAP, the market leader in back-end business software.

Fourth quarter profit rose 3.2 percent to 20 cents per share, or $1.02 billion. Those figures were 19 cents and $990 million a year ago, according to an Oracle press release. Sales rose to $3.88 billion, a profit of 26 cents per share.

Oracle no longer leads the database market. IBM and its DB2 occupy that place. But Mr. Ellison sees Oracle coming back.

“Oracle’s database business delivered another strong growth quarter,” said Mr. Ellison. “The latest Gartner, IDC and Morgan Stanley database surveys all agree that Oracle is increasing database market share while IBM’s DB2 database is in decline.”

The numbers seem to bear out Mr. Ellison’s enthusiasm. New software license sales rose to $1.61 billion, over the $1.5 billion average estimated by analysts according to a Bloomberg report. Those sales impact the future earnings of the company.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Among Oracle’s other financial results for the quarter were an increase of 4% in GAAP earnings per share were to $0.20, and a 36% increase in non-GAAP earnings per share.

Oracle also reported a 3% increase in GAAP net income, and a 35% increase in Non-GAAP net income. GAAP revenues rose 26% to $3.88 billion while, and GAAP revenues went up 32% to $4.06 billion.

“Oracle’s database business delivered another strong growth quarter,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “The latest Gartner, IDC and Morgan Stanley database surveys all agree that Oracle is increasing database market share while IBM’s DB2 database is in decline.

“This quarter marks an acceleration of that trend as more and more companies move their database applications off mainframes onto Oracle Grids,” said Ellison.

Oracle reported an increase in fourth quarter GAAP total software revenues of 24%, reaching $3.12 billion, and a 31% increase in non-GAAP total software revenues, which were $3.30 billion.

Oracle had strong performance with database and middleware new license revenues, which went up 16% to $1.26 billion. Even stronger was its increase in GAAP applications new license revenues, which shot up 52%. GAAP services revenues climbed 35%. Bloomberg News writes:

The PeopleSoft purchase and the March acquisition of Retek Inc. probably boosted sales of licenses for business applications by 30 percent to $300 million, Prudential Equity Group analyst Brent Thill in San Francisco estimated before the results.

Ellison started “Project Fusion” to show Oracle and former PeopleSoft customers how the company will weave together features from both sets of programs. Last week, he hired former Microsoft finance chief Greg Maffei, who led more than $9 billion in investments in cable, telephone and Internet companies.

“The rapid integration of PeopleSoft into our business contributed to the strong growth in both applications sales and profits that we saw in the quarter,” said Oracle President, Safra Catz. “The combination of increased organic growth plus a carefully targeted acquisition strategy have pushed Oracle’s revenue and profits to record levels.”

Today in early afternoon trading, Oracle shares were up 75 cents at $13.58 on Nasdaq. Yesterday, Oracle shares closed on the Nasdaq at $12.83.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

He hasn’t revealed the whole answer yet, but followers of Mr. Duffield’s web site can see what it won’t be.

Mr. Duffield decries several deficiencies in modern-day ERP software. Expensive to deploy, complicated to learn, and not oriented toward the needs of front end managers seem to be issues in need of a solution.

That solution may come from one of two places. One place would be Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft and residence of a recent agreement with SAP. The Microsoft-SAP partnership would meld the dominant Office suite of front-end products with SAP’s back-end software.

And another place would be Mr. Duffield’s new venture. He touts an approach that included open source solutions and XML and web services. His leadership team includes a couple of former PeopleSoft executives, so there will be no lack of brainpower at the new venture’s Walnut Creek headquarters.

Can a beloved former corporate leader face down the combined Microsoft-SAP challenge, or even that of his former firm? Java will figure prominently on the server side of the solution, as jobs for Java developers have been posted on the site.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

… a report by Fast Company says. Not as individual job seekers, however, but as a complete team.

According to a post on AdFreak, AdWeek’s blog, the team wanted to continue working together, and so they decided to auction themselves off on eBay:

“Take advantage of recent merger and acquisition activity in the technology sector. Their loss, your gain. An award-winning, clear-thinking, bottom-line-focused creative services organization is now immediately available to rock your bottom line. We are a creative team that’s ready to plug and play. Today.”

A great example of different thinking, when you do whatever it takes to find a way to earn your living.

Related: hundreds of displaced PeopleSoft employees have signed up to LinkedIn, the business-social network, in recent weeks. See PeopleSoft employee David Sohigan’s blog for details and other information helpful to PeopleSoft ex-employees looking for work.

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

According to ComputerWorld.com,

“The new pricing model is to be offered in addition to the existing PeopleSoft model and will be similar to the Oracle E-Business Suite pricing scheme, according to Jacqueline Woods, vice president for global pricing and licensing strategy at Oracle.

Oracle’s E-Business Suite is priced per named user, and the company publishes pricing and licensing details on its Web site. By contrast, there are no published prices for PeopleSoft products. Instead, pricing is calculated per customer based on a set of variables including customer revenue, number of employees and industry, in a system PeopleSoft called value-based pricing. But keeping with Oracle’s policy of offering clear prices, Woods is working to simplify the PeopleSoft pricing model.”

There has been no announcement concerning when the new prices would be available to consumers.

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This will include the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0.

“By retaining over 90 percent of PeopleSoft’s development and support organization we can deliver on our commitment to all of our applications customers,” Ellison said.

Ellison also announced “Project Fusion,” the company’s next-generation information-oriented application architecture that will combine the best features and functions of Oracle’s applications with those of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards.

“Our greatly expanded development team, will focus our resources on creating next generation information-oriented applications based completely on industry standards,” Ellison said.

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This comes after Oracle claimed that they would only keep the best employees of each company though they mainly stuck to firing PeopleSoft people.

“Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Tad Piper believes Oracle still intends to reach its original target of 6,000 layoffs, but expects the company to make the remaining job cuts very gradually.

Oracle began delivering the layoff notices Friday, but some of the affected workers might not learn of their fate for up to 10 more days. The company said it will retain 90 percent of the engineers that develop and support products, but didn’t provide other details about what types of jobs are being cut. Industry analysts expect the layoffs to be concentrated among PeopleSoft’s 11,225 employees. ”

“Oracle’s goal in acquiring PeopleSoft was to pick up the customers and not the technology, so on the whole it is no surprise that Oracle has kept only those PeopleSoft employees needed to keep the customers happy.”

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