Stories about: Siebel Systems

Big changes are coming to the CRM (customer relationship management) application market this year, with significant financial, strategic and technical implications for customers, say analysts who track the space.

Even by the bloated standards of high-tech mergers and acquisitions, Microsoft's proposed purchase of Yahoo appears to be the largest ever among technology firms. It is certainly Microsoft's largest. The company mostly buys smaller firms for less than a billion dollars to fill in gaps in its product lineup. But that may be changing. Last year, for instance, Microsoft bought Seattle online advertising firm aQuantive for US$6 billion, its largest ever until the long-rumored Yahoo deal was unveiled on Friday.

Although most companies using products acquired by Oracle plan to keep running them as long as support is available, many also fear that Oracle will ultimately force them to migrate to Oracle-built software, according to a survey of 449 members of the Oracle Applications Users Group.

Analysts said that SAP's move to part with key executives at its TomorrowNow subsidiary is likely an attempt to repair a public image that has been tarnished by allegations that TomorrowNow employees illegally downloaded confidential data from Oracle's Web site.

Oracle Corp. executives responsible for product development across the company joined together at the Oracle OpenWorld user conference on Tuesday to shed some light on current marching orders concerning Oracle's application, database and middleware technology future.

The U.S. patent and legal system has turned into a battlefield where companies and technology developers can be attacked. Open-source and free software developers have historically ignored this secondary battlefield, focusing instead on the primary battlefield of development and proliferation of their project. This omission leaves open-source projects and individual developers vulnerable to patent infringement lawsuits. By creating its own defensive patent portfolio as commercial companies do, the open-source community can arm itself for this battle.

Given the silence from the BEA Systems and Oracle camps early this week about Oracle's unsolicited proposal to buy its middleware rival, the community at large can only sit back and guess what might be the next scene in this drama.

If you're a technology firm and you're acquired by another company, you must have been doing something right. In BEA's case, an offer to be acquired by Oracle suggests the company might have been doing things a little too right.

A former vice president of Oracle agreed on Monday to settle U.S. federal charges and pay US$198,000 for allegedly making stock market profits by using insider information he learned from his wife.

Oracle has agreed to acquire business intelligence software vendor Hyperion Solutions for US$3.3 billion in cash, it said on Thursday.