Oracle buys PeopleSoft ... finally: company pledges to continue product support until 2013.

The long-running battle over the future of PeopleSoft appears to finally be over.

After a very public, often rancorous 18-month struggle, which included the ouster of its one-time chief executive, PeopleSoft announced in mid-December that it had accepted Oracle's buyout offer. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and should be completed by early January, an Oracle spokesman said. PeopleSoft had resisted the buyout as it went about growing its own business, most notably with its acquisition of J.D. Edwards in 2003. Oracle will pay $10.3 billion for the company, making it the world's second largest enterprise applications developer, after SAP.

How will the buyout affect PeopleSoft's higher education customers? Spokesmen from neither company could provide specifics at press time, saying that many details remained unsettled. PeopleSoft has nearly 12,500 customers worldwide, with more than 730 in the higher education sector. Its campus enterprise solutions include human capital management, financial management and customer relations management products.

In the early stages of the buyout attempt, Oracle Co-President Charles Phillips said that if the deal were to take place, the company would not continue developing new versions of PeopleSoft applications or versions of existing applications for new markets. And, according to Wired news, Oracle at one point drew up plans to fire more than half of PeopleSoft's workers, but the company recently signaled the purge "might not be as dramatic as management originally envisioned."

But in a phone call to analysts, Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said the merger will result in an "all new" PeopleSoft product, as well as a new J.D. Edwards enterprise application, as the first steps in developing a product that merges the three companies' applications. The new PeopleSoft 9--already in development at the time of the buyout--will run on Oracle's technology infrastructure to allow customers to benefit from a single underlying platform. Ellison said he expects the new product to be introduced within 18 to 24 months, but that PeopleSoft 9 would be the last PeopleSoft product brought to market. Oracle has pledged to support PeopleSoft products until 2013.