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It's worth taking another look at the Siebel-Oracle merger from a different angle. Too often we make a snap judgment in this kind of situation and it becomes fixed in the mind never to be seriously re-examined. Rather than that, I did a thought experiment the other day starting with the presumption that Larry Ellison has a grand strategy and that the strategy will work. It goes like this...

OK, so here we are a week later and what do we know for sure? Well, lots of things. First, Oracle now has seven assorted CRM packages from its acquisitions and those of its acquired companies -- if you count Siebel. The issue with counting Siebel is that the deal is not done yet. Don't look for the shareholders to derail this one since many have been clamoring for greater returns on their investments for quite a while. And don't look to the SEC to stop this one either. Unlike Peoplesoft, Siebel wants to be acquired, so the whole process should go much faster...

It's very rare that you get clean demarcations between historical eras. Maybe the asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago was such an event, but I wasn't there to experience it so I can't tell you. Monday, Sept. 12, 2005 will go down as a deep line in the sand identifying the before and after in the enterprise software industry. It was the day that Siebel agreed to be acquired by Oracle, and coincidently, the day that Salesforce.com opened up its Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco...

I started a blog last week and while that might make me sound like some cutting edge guru, I am anything but. My friend Paul Greenberg, whose blog inspired me because he has let me post a few entries, informed me that there are already more than 14 million of these things, and a new one is forming about every pico-second. In the hierarchy of small, a nano-anything is a billionth, e.g. 10E-9, but there are smaller smalls, for example, pico-something is a trillionth e.g.10E-12, and femto- is the impossibly tiny quadrillionth or 10E-15. (You get to digress like this on a blog. Who cares?) The point is that blogs are forming very fast and for good reasons...

I was doing research for a book a few weeks ago when a friend recommended that I re-read Geoffrey Moore's Inside the Tornado and I am glad she did. Tornado has to be about 10 years old now which puts it in a very interesting historical perspective. It's old enough to have looked back on the amazing growth of companies like HP and its printer business, Oracle, Intel, and even DEC. But by the same token, enough time has gone by to show how useful many of Moore's concepts were in forecasting the emergence of the CRM market...

"The 3Com Telecommuting module provides a critical capability for businesses with remote workers, satellite offices, even customers and partners who need reliable access to convergence communication applications including, but not limited to, IP telephony," said 3Com Vice President Denis Aull in a statement. The company also stressed the secure, seamless IP capabilities for its existing IP telephony system customers...

I love it when I can find independent verification for an idea and that's what happened on Monday when Walker Information released its "2005 Walker Loyalty Report for Software and Hardware." In case you are not familiar with Walker, this Indianapolis-based company has been studying customer loyalty since the 1930s; somebody ought to put them in the Wikipedia under that topic...

Just when I thought there was nothing going on in the dog days of summer, along came Wired magazine's August issue to remind me that yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of Netscape's IPO. That makes it a good time to stop for a moment and ponder how many ways the Internet has changed our lives, especially where a company's relationship with its customers is concerned...

A couple of weeks ago, which corresponds with my absence from this space last week, I was on vacation trying hard to not think about work or CRM, but something hit me while watching a ballgame. I don't have a lot of current statistical data to back me up, so this might even be right ...

I have enjoyed reading Clayton Christensen's books on disruptive innovation and observing how many of the concepts articulated in his books have played out in the CRM market and beyond. With the theory in mind, it has been fascinating to watch as smart people have behaved in ways that are either predictably on target or way off the mark. One of the more interesting chess matches to watch over several years has been the growing importance of hosting in the CRM market...

I was on vacation when the news came out and for the life of me, I could not understand why Microsoft decided to announce version 3.0 of its CRM product a few days before July 4th -- the biggest public holiday of the year -- when practically no one was looking. They weren't alone. Siebel also made an announcement designed to garner minimal exposure...

One of the best parts of being an analyst or a journalist is that you get pretty easy entry to some of the most interesting companies in your space. I feel particularly fortunate to be able to call up a company to ask for a briefing. Most of the time they say yes and I get to spend an hour or so on the phone or in person talking to smart people about cutting edge ideas in business and technology. This ringside seat gives me access to understanding about where the market is moving as well as insight into the how and why...

When I was in high school, the summer reading list included titles like Great Expectations that were sure to induce a coma-like state if I tried to read them while hanging out at the pool or beach. As adults we look for mindless potboiler paperbacks to stuff in the beach bag and maybe we feel a bit guilty for it. But if you are looking for guilt-free reading that might even help your professional life when you get back to the desk in September, I can recommend several titles that will keep your attention when the sun gets high and motivation is low...

The big CRM news last week was Siebel's announcement initiating a dividend for its investors. In an open letter to shareholders, CEO George Shaheen announced the 2.5 cent dividend in typical Wall Street-ese, promising that future payments would be based on a decision of the board and, obviously, on how the company is fairing, etc., etc ...

"Have you ever gotten annoyed with hitting the back button repeatedly to get back to the original search results?" asks Denise Ho, MSN Search Toolbar project manager. "MSN Search Toolbar gives you the option to open MSN Search results in new background tabs. This is a huge time saver because it lets you keep the search results on one tab while links that you click open in the background."

Whenever I think about the direction of the CRM market and of technology and business in general, my mind keeps coming back to some data I saw in The Economist magazine in April. Frequent readers might recall this graphic from an article in the April 23 edition of The Economist titled "Looking for Trouble."Figure 1: Capital investment decline ...

When Marc Benioff asked me in New York what I thought of last week's Salesforce.com briefing and demonstration of CustomForce, I had to tell him the truth. I was impressed but not surprised -- after all, I have been writing about this approach to new application development and integration for over a year and the demo confirmed my predictions. But I was not and am still not trying to brag about it. Truth be told, I thought it would take years to get to this point -- it happened a lot faster than I had expected...

There has been so much to write about lately that I might have to break my own rule and file two pieces this week. I write this and other columns for fun, not profit, and I need to discipline myself to both tend to the for-profit knitting, and keep from overexposing myself. If I wanted to publish more frequently, I'd look into political punditry, and then where would the country be?...

The seasons of CRM are hard to describe but nevertheless interesting; they follow no conventional calendar and things tend to bunch up in a short time window in the spring and fall, preceded and followed by long periods of relative equilibrium. Last year I wrote about what I called the silly season, a time in the late spring and early summer when the major analyst firms reveal their CRM market share numbers for the previous calendar year...

Several macro trends are working their way through the CRM industry right now and having a direct impact on how CRM is sold. These trends include application hosting, tailoring horizontal CRM applications to fit the specific needs of vertical markets, and increasing reliance by software vendors on reseller channels to better meet the demands of specialized markets...