If the system works without a NER component, it only knows that "Oracle" and "Peo-pleSoft" are proper noun phrases, and its confidence in correctness of a candidate relation instance Acquisition(Oracle, PeopleSoft) cannot be very high.
both entities occur many times elsewhere in the corpus, sometimes in strongly discriminating contexts, such as "Oracle is a company that…" or "PeopleSoft Inc." If the system somehow learned that such contexts indicate entities of the correct type for the Acquisition relation (i.e., companies), then the system would be able to boost its confidence in both entities ("Oracle" and "PeopleSoft") being of correct types and, consequently, in (Oracle, PeopleSoft) being a correct instance of the Acquisition relation.