Siebel, Oracle execs unite to reassure users

IDG News Service - Siebel Systems Inc. CEO George Shaheen shared the stage with a group of Oracle Corp. executives Monday at Oracle's OpenWorld conference, a tableau that Oracle President Charles Phillips joked attendees likely never expected to see.
The group assembled for a hastily arranged town hall meeting aimed at explaining the benefits both companies anticipate from their $5.85 billion union, which was announced last week.
Oracle enlisted an extensive roster of executives, customers and partners to testify about the synergies between the once-bitter rivals and the resources Oracle will devote to ensuring a smooth transition for Siebel's customers. As he did during his keynote address Monday, Phillips spoke about Oracle's intention to pick off the best features from each of its application lines to incorporate into its forthcoming Project Fusion applications suite.
"We can't take anything away if we expect people to upgrade. It's got to be a superset," he said, in a discussion of the functionality customers can expect from the Fusion applications.
Phillips also pledged again to support customers on whatever applications they currently run. At least until Project Fusion's release, Oracle will preserve the brands of its acquired applications and continue selling them. Oracle's sales team has a playbook detailing each product line's strengths. For example, PeopleSoft's long history in the state and local government markets means its applications will often be the ones Oracle suggests to new customers in those sectors, Phillips said.
One joint Oracle/Siebel customer attending the meeting, Fujitsu Principal Business Solutions Consultant Debra Lilley, said she's eager to begin experiencing the benefits of increased integration between the two vendors' software lines.
Fujitsu uses Siebel for customer relationship management and Oracle for its financials and supply-chain management. It has built its own data hub to unify information from the two systems, but Lilley, who is the director of Oracle's U.K. user group, said she's impressed with Oracle's data hub technology and would prefer to use Oracle-built integration technology. She would like to see Oracle release such technology before it begins releasing Fusion application components, the first of which are due in 2007.

"We've made a significant investment in these two systems, so if they are going to be more aligned, that's to our good," Lilley said.
After Siebel, Oracle may finally be tapped out on its ability to pull off multibillion-dollar deals without taking on significant debt: Oracle Chief Financial Officer Greg Maffei estimated that Siebel's effective purchase price of around $4 billion, excluding Siebel's cash supply and including Oracle's expenses for the deal, is equal