Ellison comments on acquisition plans

Some interesting news coming out of Oracle's OpenWorld conference this week in San Francisco. The San Jose Mercury News is reporting on comments made there by Larry Ellison to reporters after his keynote address.

• Most of Siebel's workforce will not be laid off. Ellison says that Siebel has already cut enough staff. This is consistent with Oracle's previous indications that Siebel's products will be the basis for CRM in Project Fusion. However, I wouldn't take that to mean there will be no layoffs as a result of the Siebel takeover. I wouldn't want to be an Oracle CRM developer right now.



• Oracle has no plans for any more big acquisitions, for at least the next year. Specifically, BEA is not on Oracle's radar screen, having fallen from the number two spot for application servers to number three.



• Ellison does not see less competition in the applications marketplace as a result of vendor consolidation. He pointed specifically to Microsoft and software on-demand vendors such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite as growing competitors.

Interestingly, Ellison noted that he is an investor in both NetSuite and Salesforce.com, but he would like to see his investment go to zero.

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