Larry Ellison adds Siebel to his stable of acquisitions, and now (officially) goes head-to-head with his old protege Mark Benioff, who now heads Salesforce.com. The deal is for approximately $5.85 billion, or USD$10.66 per share.
What it means:
Siebel has been struggling to find its footing, and Oracle continues to look for ways to increase its footprint against SAP. This acquisition does both.
It gives Oracle a vault into the on-demand, Software As A Service (SaaS) space for CRM. Siebel’s acquisition of Upshot in November, 2003 gave it a credible entry into the market, and now Oracle may be able to put the muscle behind it that Siebel could not, to give the broadest challenge to Salesforce and NetSuite.
The timing of the announcement is interesting, and takes some of the air out of the sails that Salesforce is announcing their AppExchange market today (thanks Zoli). AppExchange is touted to be an “eBay for on-demand applications,” and has been launched at AppExchange.com. Instead of creating all the applications (a la SAP), or acquiring them (a la Oracle), Benioff aims to be the infrastructure upon which interconnected enterprise apps run.
First Skype and eBay, now these announcements. Something’s in the water today…
tags: oracle, siebel, salesforce.com, netsuite, appexchange, SAP, SaaS, CRM, on-demand