Siebel may confuse Oracle's Fusion plan

Oracle's takeover of Siebel looks set to proceed, complicating the firm's business apps portfolio still further

Oracle is expected to complete its acquisition of customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Siebel this week. But some watchers have warned that the merger could slow down Fusion – Oracle’s overarching plan to create a single framework spanning all its enterprise applications.

Tomorrow, 31 January, Siebel stockholders will meet and almost certainly approve the deal. Regulatory restrictions mean that Oracle has not yet been able to detail its plans, but clues point to intriguing possibilities. As well as bolstering its CRM offering, the database giant may use the purchase more broadly for composite application development, roles-based processes and to glean more expertise in delivering software as a service.

Siebel late last year released a framework called Component Assembly – part of its multi-year Project Nexus and developed in association with Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems – that is intended to speed up application customisation through component reuse. It is based on Ajax (Asynchronous Java and XML), a set of principles that is catching on fast in creating composite mash-up programs.

Component Assembly also works across J2EE and dot-Net, potentially broadening the appeal of the largely Java-focused Fusion.

In a video statement at Siebel’s CustomerWorld conference in October, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison hinted at adopting Siebel service-oriented architecture (SOA) elements. “What Siebel has done with SOA dovetails beautifully with Oracle’s plans for Fusion,” he said.

Oracle may also be attracted to a major thrust in Siebel development that focuses on user roles so that, for example, a sales executive’s screen would have different processes to that of support staff. Microsoft is following a similar path with its Dynamics business applications.

John Wookey, Oracle senior vice-president of application development, was recently reported as saying that the firm is considering use of some Siebel technologies including Nexus and on-demand capabilities as part of the broader Fusion stack. Although Siebel OnDemand has been widely regarded as a late response to the success of hosted CRM rivals, some observers have been impressed by the speed with which Siebel has added upgrades to functionality.

However, some watchers questioned whether Component Assembly fulfilled the original vision for Project Nexus.

Siebel may confuse Oracle's Fusion plan

Oracle's takeover of Siebel looks set to proceed, complicating the firm's business apps portfolio still further

“Siebel had gone awfully quiet on Nexus and had stopped briefing on it [before the Oracle merger announcement],” said David Bradshaw, an Ovum analyst. “I had the impression it was taking longer than they thought.”

Meanwhile, Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting noted that the time taken to acquire Siebel could restrict its role in the Fusion project.

Oracle earlier this month announced that it was halfway to developing Fusion, but Greenbaum argued that it is “more like a quarter-way there”. He also doubted it would be feasible to add in customer record tools and capabilities for specific industries in time for the planned 2008 release.

The extent of Oracle’s challenge with Fusion was highlighted last week when rival SAP reported better than expected financials. The German enterprise applications giant also predicted that it would win about 220 customers this year as a result of Oracle’s acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel.