In the three months since Oracle's acquisition of Siebel, a big focus of mine has been ensuring that Siebel's leadership becomes part of our leadership team.  I think we've accomplished that. For example, Ed Abbo, who was the head of development at Siebel, is now in charge of Oracle's entire CRM development group and reports to me. Siebel leaders like Ed bring a tremendous depth of experience to Oracle. That experience will enable us to build better applications by applying the best practices from Siebel, as well as the PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Oracle product lines.

There are four very strong parts of Siebel's business that made it an attractive acquisition target for Oracle.

One, obviously, is the core CRM technology. Siebel is clearly the world leader in this marketplace by all measures: customer success, market share and technology. The company has rich, deep CRM functionality and their success shows it.

But Siebel also has amazing industry-specific capabilities. I've come to appreciate that horizontal CRM is a fantasy.  Dream CRM is about specific vertical marketplace requirements. Siebel took a very strong core set of functionality around service, marketing and sales, and developed best practices and specific capability around specific industries--such as high-tech, pharmaceuticals, and CPG. And they did it in an innovative way. They invested a lot in industry-specific domain expertise and built some very unique industry content and capabilities on top of the CRM components.

The third very powerful capability from Siebel is the company's business analytics.  They acquired analytic technology about six years ago and really invested in it to create market-leading analytics capabilities. And of course, because they were an applications company, it wasn't just a BI engine. They'd invested a lot in building content-rich dashboards--again, by industry. That allowed them to go out and help customers understand what was happening in their business. And to do it from data sources beyond just Siebel applications--including other applications, and custom systems that customers themselves had created.

Additionally, the combination of Oracle and Siebel also created the world's largest and most comprehensive on-demand offering. The combined talents, expertise, and vision of the Oracle/Siebel organization will give customers access to the industry's broadest range of enterprise computing solutions delivered with a services-based approach. That means continued innovation and flexibility, but with additional options and at a lower cost.

These four key Siebel strengths, and the great talent we inherited, are critical to how this acquisition is going to make our customers and Oracle successful in the future. Siebel people and assets are helping to drive our CRM strategy, our vertical strategy, and our business intelligence strategy.  Three months in, and I'm more confident than ever that our merger with Siebel is a very powerful combination with rapid and tangible benefits for our collective customers.

JW