Oracle and Siebel – merger – is official

Yesterday, Oracle’s President Charles Philips announced that Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel is completed and Oracle and Siebel are now operating as one. One of the comments in the official announcement reads: “We also plan to evolve customers, at their own pace, to the next generation of
our standards-based applications, Oracle Fusion Applications. Siebel CRM will be
the centerpiece of our Oracle Fusion CRM strategy and we plan to incorporate the
best features of all of our product lines into Oracle Fusion CRM.” Having now to somehow fuse together Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Retek and Siebel, functionally and technologically seems like a tremendous challenge. I am very curious as to when we will see the first Oracle Fusion Applications that are the replacement of all corresponding predecessors in each of the current ERP/CRM stacks. And the Fusion Tools and Middleware that are really the product of merging together the best technologies currently underlying all these ERP/CRM products. It seems difficult to see how the current Siebel technology can already have made its impact on the current development with Fusion Technology – as the acquisition was only completed yesterday. The current Fusion timeline I believe runs until 2008 and Oracle indicated recently to be on schedule. That would be impressive – to release fully integrated, single technology stack suite of ERP and CRM applications by 2008. I do not want to sound like a disbelieving Thomas, but I won’t hold my breath either. See www.oracle.com/siebel for more details.