In the hoopla around Skype-eBay, I almost forgot that Oracle bought Siebel Systems for $5.8 billion. Sign of the times, that I spent, most of my energies on a deal that had more ‘shock-and-awe’ element than on a deal that could well, at least puts Siebel out of its misery.
Sramana Mitra says now Larry should try and convince Marc Benioff to sell out to Oracle.”If Oracle could indeed pick up Salesforce.com, that would give Microsoft & SAP a run for their money in CRM / Enterprise Apps,” she says. Indeed a good thought, but pigs will fly before that will happen.
Marc “The Mouth” Benioff was busy poking fun at Larry and the gang and announced something called Appexchange. An eBay for Applications? (Pssh Marc… eBay needs to buy growth these days, so maybe you should say, Firefox of Apps!) Anyway back to Larry – Benioff had this to say…
> Client/Server software is being consolidated by Oracle just as mainframe software was consolidated by Computer Associates. Oracle’s strategy is simple. Instead of innovating, buy as much installed software as possible, call it all Oracle Fusion, and make sure it all uses Oracle’s database.
My man Om, the shock of this merger is that Lord Larry paid a puny amount for Tom’s fiefdom. When you does the numbers, my man, you see the real shock here:
Larry bought a ton’o’cash, a recurring revenue stream on maintenance, and paid very little for the core business…..in fact he done paid as much for Tom’s core business as eBay paid for Sk(h)ype.
That must rub Tom the wrong way, man. I should know, I used to hang with Tom (worked for him).