Buying Siebel is not a problem, says Oracle

Database giant insists it can cope with all its acqusitions

Oracle insists that its $5.8bn (£3.2bn) acquisition of Siebel will have no negative effects on the database giant.

Company president Charles Phillips told delegates at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco that Oracle’s size – it has 50,000 employees - means buying smaller vendors is not a problem.

‘Keep in mind the size of the company as you hear about us making acquisitions, a lot of the firms we have bought have about 2,000 to 5,000 people in them, so relative to our size, they’re quite small, they’re not disruptive to us,’ he said.

Oracle has acquired 10 companies or products in the past 12 months.

Phillips also unveiled several new Oracle initiatives, including a lifelong support programme for users of the company's products.

‘The lifetime support policy means that any product you are using from Oracle will get a very high level of support for as long as it is needed,’ he said.

Ovum analyst David Mitchell says the promise of lifetime support will be important for retaining customers of major acquisitions such as PeopleSoft and Siebel.

‘One of the first things that people asked after the PeopleSoft acquisition was how long are you going to keep these products around for? How long will it be before Oracle forces us to go to the new generation of products? This announcement will have reassured a lot of people that they will get support for as long as they want,’ he said.

‘Typically, when you come to an Oracle event what you get is the latest product. A focus on support is quite a new thing.’

Other announcements at the conference included projects to link IBM’s WebSphere middleware products with Oracle’s Fusion suite, and a new support system for independent software vendors.

Phillips also said that the pace of innovation in Oracle’s products will be measured and steady, in order to help customers manage change.

‘We want to give people more value for the products they are already using. We want to evolve our products at a reasonable pace, a pace that our customers are able to accommodate, giving people a choice about when they take on new technologies,’ he said.