As his company steps up efforts to see off Oracle's hostile bid, PeopleSoft chief Craig Conway has told industry executives that bitter rivals PeopleSoft, Oracle and SAP will soon have to take a common course.

"The big three enterprise software vendors have to code their products to integrate out of the box with each other's products," Conway (pictured) told delegates at the CeBIT trade show in New York.

"Every industry develops to deal with the ownership experience, but so far that has not been done in the enterprise software industry."

Taking out the complexity from deploying rival products together is essential, explained Conway, because the majority of enterprises have products from each vendor.

And while the burden of integrating systems has traditionally fallen on customers, this has to change.

"That burden should be the burden of the software vendor. It is happening now at PeopleSoft and I have no doubt it will happen at SAP and Oracle," he said.

Conway explained that PeopleSoft already has 500 programmers working to make its software work with its rivals' products. Such a step signals the beginning of the end of middleware, he said.

Conway touched on PeopleSoft's ongoing bid for software maker JD Edwards, highlighting how the two companies' products and customer bases will complement each other.

He suggested that the acquisition would strengthen PeopleSoft in three market areas: mid-sized business; manufacturing; and the IBM AS/400. "It's a very compelling acquisition," he stated.

Conway briefly alluded to Oracle's hostile bid. "[The JD Edwards deal] caught the interest of Wall Street, it caught the interest of industry analysts and it definitely caught the interest of competitors," he said.