News Review: Oracle + Peoplesoft + Siebel
If you can't make it, buy it.
The recent announcement that Oracle will be buying Siebel had been fairly widely predicted in some areas of the press. Oracle are paying $5.8 billion for 4,000 customers. I guess this is relatively small money, compared with the $10 billion they paid for PeopleSoft.
However, this leaves Oracle with a massive workload to integrate and get value from all their many products and offerings.
The Support Challenge
If you look through Oracle's acquisitions during the last few years, there is a huge amount of CRM software which they have in their portfolio:
- Peoplesoft
- Vantive (part of PeopleSoft)
- JD Edwards
- plus Oracle's own offering
- and now Siebel
How on earth could Oracle support that many different code lines for just one functional requirement?
Some clues about how Oracle might wish to do this are in a recent article in Oracle Scene, the UK Oracle User Group Journal, about Project Fusion.
Fusion is the name for Oracle's new Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA), which is a way of building software applications which promote connectivity between applications. Oracle will need it!. The article explained how this approach would bring together the best of Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. Perhaps SOA-enabling all these tools will work.
But there is still a lot of (redundant?) code to support.
Motivation
So why did Oracle buy Siebel?
Basically, there are a number of reasons for buying a rival manufacturer in the industry:
Gain technology, to update or improve your own offering Take out a competitor, to enable you to charge monopoly prices Defensive action, to consolidate against another, larger rival. Somehow, I don't think Oracle have bought Siebel in order to gain some valuable piece of technology. Instead, I think the second and third reasons are more likely
In the case of third reason, the big rival is, of course, SAP. However, Oracle may have a large percentage of the market share of CRM / ERP software, but their offering is fragmented, unfocused, and expensive to support.
There is a battle between Oracle and SAP. And any general will tell you that the organization which is able to mass all it's forces against a single point of attack will win the battle.
Oracle is in desperate need of a good coordinating strategy.
Reviewed by Dennis Adams in September 2005