Renee Boucher Ferguson

Its official: Oracle confirmed that it completed the acquisition of Siebel Systems late in the day Jan. 31 after shareholders voted overwhelmingly to accept the $5.85 billion deal. After completing the merger, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claimed in a statement that his company “is now the undisputed leader in customer relationship management software.” “Oracles focus […]

After months of hinting, SAP AG will announce Feb. 2 its long-awaited platform for on-demand CRM software, at dual events in Palo Alto, Calif., and New York. But the competition for on-demand customers is fierce. Smaller niche players like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and RightNow Technologies have all been in the on-demand game for half a decade—and […]

Sybase Inc. subsidiary iAnywhere announced Jan. 30 at the Global RFID ROI Summit in London new software to help RFID hardware vendors develop “smart” readers. The radio-frequency identification Anywhere Appliance Edition is software that can be embedded on readers to help deploy advanced functionality for things like security and communication protocol support. The Anywhere Appliance […]

Salesforce.com, which has had several high-profile system outages over the past couple of months, is apparently still having issues. Salesforce.coms servers were down for several hours on Jan. 30, between about 10 a.m. and 2:15 p.m. Eastern, according to Salesforce.com customers. “Theyve had problems all morning,” said Mark Siler, vice president of IT at Priority […]

Microsoft Business Solutions, the applications division of Microsoft, is out of the red and into the black. The group posted $242 million in sales Jan. 26 for its second quarter of 2006—a $10 million profit for the heretofore losing division. For the second-quarter period last year, MBS lost $17 million on sales of $207 million. […]

Jumping the gun on Oracles imminent acquisition of Seibel Systems next week, the official Oracle users group announced Jan. 26 that the club is open to Siebel customers. Siebel users now have an open invitation to OAUGs (Oracle Applications User Group) Community Integration Initiative, which will enable those companies recently acquired by Oracle—some 13 companies […]

With a fervor not generally seen in earning calls, SAP AG laid out its plans for 2006—as well as for the next four years. During its Jan. 25 fourth-quarter and full-year 2005 earnings call, SAP said its goal for 2010 is to quadruple earnings by increasing the “addressable market” to $70 billion, 50 percent of […]

While Oracle has remained, out of necessity, relatively quiet about its plans with Siebel Systems, some details are starting to emerge. Oracle is expected to close the acquisition of CRM (customer relationship management) software developer Siebel on Jan. 31. The company has said publicly it will base its next-generation suite of CRM applications—Fusion CRM—on Siebels […]

German software giant SAP and Sybase, which develops middleware, are teaming up around radio-frequency identification. Sybase announced Jan. 23 a partnership that certifies its RFID Anywhere 2.0 software on SAPs Auto-ID Infrastructure. The combination of the two suites will benefit primarily SAPs ERP (enterprise resource planning) installed base who are also using RFID technology, or […]

The massive initiative formerly known as Oracle Corp.s Project Fusion has a new name and is halfway to being completed, says President Charles Phillips, but analysts and some customers still question the necessity and value of the undertaking. One industry analyst questioned whether Oracle can fairly claim to have reached the halfway mark in the […]