Siebel : Oracle’s Best Acquisition

The Long awaited contest is showing signs of results. Siebel analytics is beginning to show early success in some cases as a preferred option in place of pureplay BI solutions. Siebel’s product vision and investments are beginning to show results. Pity that they sold out so early. Many think that CRM is not a hyper growth market – Siebel should not be seen just as a s CRM company. Siebel’s analytics, on-demand solutions and composite applications platform called the Component Assembly and their PCA equivalent called Component Application Sets (CAS) are the newly emerging potential winners . As I wrote earlier, am sad to see Siebel go - but am surprised what would Oracle substantially benefit out of this - how would Oracle hold on to such a large customer base and how would they feel about Oracle's acquistion. I can not avoid thinking about the developments in other industries. The integration challenge increases significantly for Oracle.I personally beleive that this would benefit in an unexpected way SAP & SaaS application providers & Oracle in that order - SAP customers using Siebel shall closely begin to look at SAP CRM, nervous siebel customers may begin to look at SaaS to tide over immediate switching pains and Oracle may also benefit to an extent. The early field reaction gathered from siebel customers have not been negative to Oracle, so far. In fact many say that the technical support from oracle has substantially scaled up. We have to see how oracle grows these four distinct growth engines OF Siebel - CRM, Analytics, On-Demand, CAS. It would be interesting to see how Oracle’s fusion vision binds all these. Siebel certainly had a lot of promise – on the flip side, this may turn out to be amongst oracle’s best acquisition thus far.Now its time for Oracle to reverse the depressed stock price - after all SAP is one amongst the few stocks that did not shed marketcap in the recent past, while Oracle was aggressively engaged in acquiring companies.