Oracle In Talks To Buy Siebel

from the who-else-can-they-own dept

It appears that Oracle's acquisition appetite hasn't been sated just yet. Following Oracle's long struggle to buy PeopleSoft (who had just bought J.D. Edwards), they beat out rival SAP for Retek, and then must have laughed when SAP's CEO was quoted out of context in a way that made some over-eager people think that Oracle wanted to buy SAP. However, Oracle did say a couple days ago that they're still very much in acquisition mode, looking for the right deals. So, the latest rumor is that Oracle and Siebel are now in talks to merger, which must upset super-competitive Siebel founder and former Oracle employee Tom Siebel quite a bit. However, it would explain what George Shaheen was brought in to do. If he pulls a David Duffield he may end up better than he did with his Webvan severance package. Still, at some point, you have to wonder if Oracle is just getting a bunch of companies on the downside of their useful lives as application providers. Beyond the trouble of integrating so many large companies together, they'll also have to reinvent the strategies for those companies that were discovering their legacy enterprise applications were becoming too cumbersome these days.