If there is any bright spot in the news that Oracle is laying off 5,000 former PeopleSoft employees, it is that the layoffs will be distributed world wide.“When you look at where the redundancies are coming from they come from field offices where there is overlap with non-strategic, back office functions,” said Josh Greenbaum, principal analyst with Enterprise Applications Consulting.Greenbaum noted that yesterday at the former PeopleSoft office in New Zealand, Oracle laid off about 30 of the 40 employees. In addition, over the last year, PeopleSoft picked up a great many international employees when it acquired J. D. Edwards.Once the dust settles, Greenbaum sees a number of challenges ahead for Oracle as they absorb PeopleSoft. “The number one challenge is customer retention,” according to Greenbaum. Oracle needs to keep PeopleSoft customers happy and signing up for maintenance licenses in order to pay for new product development. Oracle also has a new market and the real value will come from up sell and cross sell to all of those PeopleSoft enterprise users.From a cost structure, Oracle also needs to get all of its users onto a single platform as soon as possible. The alternative is to support three platforms, its own, J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft. Oracles track record with acquisitions is mixed. It earns high marks in its most recent acquisition of database company RDB a few years ago, said Greenbaum.“They did a good job of keeping customers happy and upgrading. However, when they bought application vendor Gemms the transition did not go as smoothly. They had some integration problems,” Greenbaum said.Greenbaum believes that Peoplesoft may be one of Oracle’s best resources in making the transition work. “Peoplesoft has had a number of successful mergers with companies, including its most recent with J. D. Edwards. Oracle should tap into that savvy.” Technology Industry