The news today is that Oracle has reached an agreement to buy
Siebel Systems, the big developer of CRM software.
So Oracle absorbs yet another competitor led by a former
Oracle executive. Unlike the hostile takeover of
PeopleSoft, though, this one appears to be friendly.
Tom Siebel is quoted as calling this a "wonderful,
exciting event." That's just a little different from the
way Craig Conway saw the offer for PeopleSoft!
Well, that's probably a good thing. Now that we are—dare
I say it?—on the Oracle side, we can hope for a quick,
smooth merger. Although it's been struggling for some time,
Siebel does have 4,000 customers
and 3.4 million users.
Presumably a large number of them will be new to Oracle.
I wonder if Siebel will become part of Project Fusion?
With the Oracle and PeopleSoft customer relationship management modules,
that would make at least three different CRM products to be
"fused."
We'll get back to tech talk next week with a look at a few "best practices that
sometimes aren't." (You can probably find them right now
in your team's development standards manual.)
