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Oracle Agrees to buy Siebel

With the announcement that Oracle has agreed to buy Siebel today, Oracle will be no.1 in CRM solutions. I have spoke to several people this morning, including our Oracle expert and watcher Srini Sankar, about this acquisiton. We agree this clearly indicates that the CRM industry is going through major consolidation. In the last 18 months, Oracle has been checking off the list of companies to buy as it promised when it would was in court over the Peoplesoft acquisition. Here’s what Oracle has done:

1. Buys a majority stake in India's largest applications business, I-flex solutions Ltd
2. Buys Retail forecast software maker ProfitLogic
3. Purchased retail-software specialist Retek
4. Acquired Secure ID Software Provider Oblix
5. Acquired Peoplesoft
6. Acquired Context Media, a content integration company

To acquire Retek, Oracle went on a bidding war with SAP. This shows Oracle’s aggressiveness in acquisitions to position them as a leader in the industry. With these recent acquisitions it clearly indicates Oracle is pushing to be no.1 in the ERP suite market. None of these acquisitions have much to do with their stronghold database technologies. Their focus is on the Applications market. Oracle’s other targets could be:

1. Business Objects (BO)
2. BEA Systems
3. Hyperion Solutions

And the list goes on….

The acquisition of BO will be very fruitful and profitable for Oracle as it would advance their business intelligence analysis and query capabilities tremendously. The Discoverer tool looks up to BO in many categories. Similarly a BEA Systems purchase (tool Weblogic) would also be a key asset for Oracle’s growth as it would improve their Application Server technologies.

The game in enterprise software is to become attractive to Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or SAP.

  Posted by William McKnight on September 12, 2005 11:44 AM |

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Comments

Oracle needs to do something about its business intelligence solution. It's made very little progress in this area of late and it doesn't seem very interested in this topic. Given all the new BI releases from BO, Cognos, Hyperion and Microsoft coming this fall, and the more agressive move by IBM in this area, Oracle needs to do something. Moving Siebel analytics into mainstream BI would be a good start. Colin White.

Posted by: Colin White | September 12, 2005 12:59 PM

I am just wondering why Oracle has been so silent on acuqiring Bo or Hyperion. This has been a talk for quite a while but there is something in Oracle's mind thats it is shying away from this acquistion. Probably early next year they would have a strategy . As such in a typical DW project requirements , ETL , DataMart and Presentation are the cycles . Oracle is ready with all the three in the fusion space so its just a matter of time to select which BI tool needs to be part of their product fusion.

Posted by: Phani C | November 22, 2005 1:36 PM

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