PeopleSoft Wednesday stepped up its public campaign to fend off an unsolicited buy by Oracle by taking out full-page newspaper ads featuring 10 PeopleSoft customers decrying the takeover bid.

"We considered Oracle once, rejected them in favor of PeopleSoft, and their most recent behavior simply confirms that we wouldn't give them a second look," IMI BEVCORe Solutions President and CEO Ray Ouellette says in an ad appearing in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal Wednesday.

The ad campaign is just the latest twist in the battle between the enterprise software providers, which began almost two weeks ago when Oracle announced that it was making a $5.1 billion bid for PeopleSoft, just days after PeopleSoft said that it planned to buy J.D. Edwards.

Both companies have taken to the broadsheets already this week, running ads containing a series of pot shots against each another.

Oracle's unsolicited offer lit a firestorm in the industry and ultimately threatened PeopleSoft's acquisition of J.D. Edwards. Earlier this week, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards amended their merger agreement in an effort to speed up the deal in the face of an Oracle buyout.

The ad campaign is a further defensive move by PeopleSoft to fend off the takeover, aimed at stirring the emotions of the company's customers and shareholders. The Pleasanton, Calif., company is hoping to close software contracts with customers in order to meet financial targets, but is also airing concerns over the viability of its product line if Oracle takes over.

One testimonial, from University of Massachusetts Administration Systems Director Brad Ridley, says that "the fact that Oracle announced a plan that would have discontinued new PeopleSoft code line development demonstrates their blatant disregard for customer's (sic) best interests."

Oracle representatives in the U.K. declined to comment on the ads Wednesday.

In related news, The Distributors and Manufacturers' User Group (DMUG) threw its support behind PeopleSoft's rejection of the Oracle offer Wednesday, saying that "Oracle must have very little respect for PeopleSoft's customers to believe that any manufacturing organization running mission-critical applications could 'gracefully' switch from one vendor's application suite to another at minimal cost."

The organization, made up of independent manufacturing companies, claimed that Oracle's takeover plans would cost PeopleSoft customers millions of dollars to switch to Oracle's offerings.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.