When I started at PeopleSoft we had offices in downtown Walnut Creek. Downtown Walnut Creek was nice because there were well over 100 restaurants and bars within walking distance of the office.
Eventually we had to move the headquarters about 20 miles south down to Pleasanton because the company was growing too fast to be able to obtain office space in downtown Walnut Creek. The PeopleSoft offices in Pleasanton were nice buildings, but there wasn't too much within walking distance. Downtown Pleasanton (which is nice), was just a bit too far to drive and parking isn't always easy there. The only times that I ever made it into downtown Pleasanton was for dinners with customers or analysts. Even the official PeopleSoft drinking establishment in Pleasanton, the Hopyard (famous for the "Wall of Foam"), was not within walking distance of the offices.
So, it was a bit amusing to find out today that Workday, whose current offices are just up the road from the old PeopleSoft Walnut Creek headquarters building, are now planning on moving down to Pleasanton in a few months. It's deja vu all over again.
No word on where exactly they are moving, but I took a quick check on CB Richard Ellis's website (they use PeopleSoft at CBRE), and discovered a nice place for them at 4305 Hacienda Drive. That picture might not look familiar to you (unless you worked there :-), but it is another set of buildings that PeopleSoft owned that are just one block down the street from the PeopleSoft/Oracle headquarters.
What's really interesting is that I'm pretty sure that PeopleSoft owned those buildings outright(1) when the Oracle acquisition closed, so it's possible that Oracle still owns those(2) and is just leasing them via CB Richard Ellis. So Oracle could end up renting office space to Workday just down the street from the current PeopleSoft/Oracle offices!
Wouldn't that be something? :-)
(1) Those buildings are the ones that PeopleSoft had to kick a few customers out of when the buildings were purchased. PeopleSoft bought the buildings (this was 3 additional buildings at the 4305 Hacienda location) because of growth requirements, and had to (slowly) kick out the various companies that leased office space there. Unfortunately a few of those companies were actual PeopleSoft customers. Ooops....
(2) Not likely though. Oracle sold half of the buildings at the PeopleSoft headquarters campus to Kaiser Permanente a few years back. So, they probably would have sold the rest of the PeopleSoft real estate holdings after the acquisition.
Also, earlier this year, Oracle sold the rest to Kaiser, but are leasing them back while they build a new building on some additional space that PeopleSoft used to own. So, they're actually slowly moving closer to the 580 freeway.
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