Oracle's Phillips: Analytical Software Among The 'Hidden Jewels' Of The Siebel Deal

Oracle Corp. president Charles Phillips told Siebel Systems customers today that Siebel's business-intelligence applications, as well as the momentum of its on-demand CRM offering, were "hidden jewels" of Oracle's pending $5.9 billion acquisition of the CRM software company.

The business-intelligence apps, called Siebel Analytics, represent an area Oracle covets--namely, providing closer to real-time visibility into customer-facing business processes. "This is another area that's very strategic to us," Phillips said in his keynote address at Siebel Systems' CustomerWorld conference in Boston. "The technology is very impressive."

Phillips said Siebel's emerging technology roadmap--in which it makes more functions available as software components that can be plugged into .Net and J2EE environments--mirrors Oracle's strategy of developing service-based, standards-based apps that can run on a variety of middleware platforms, including its own Fusion line. Those strategies, he said, should lessen the complexity of integrating of Siebel's technology into Oracle's product line. "The good thing about standards is, almost anybody we buy has a similar architecture to what we're marching toward," said Phillips.

Phillips praised Siebel's momentum in the on demand or hosted CRM market. However, Siebel's sales in that hosted market trail well behind Salesforce.com.

Phillips also echoed some of the promises he made at Oracle's OpenWorld conference last month:

-- He restated Oracle's new lifetime support initiative, telling Siebel customers that they will be able to continue running their existing deployments.

-- He said Oracle's Project Fusion initiative, in which it plans to combine the best-of-breed functionality of its growing line of apps into one integrated suite, will not force customers to migrate to a new app platform.

-- He promised Oracle would back Siebel's ongoing R&D investments.

-- He predicted product support would improve under Oracle, claiming support satisfaction among PeopleSoft customers rose after its acquisition of PeopleSoft was completed.