Frankly speaking, this came as a surprise to me, even though Oracle had mentioned Siebel (and BEA among other companies) as one of its potential takeover targets, I doubt if people really believed Oracle would do another big acquisition so soon.
But then the signs were there for people to see: Charles Philips' statement that Oracle had completed the PeopleSoft deal and that it was ready to do more deals. Oracle's hiring of Greg Maffei as its new CFO. Hmm..
Read the Oracle press release here.
Read the Siebel press release here - the Siebel link actually points to an Oracle URL.
Some details on Siebel and the deal:
- 4,000 applications customers
- 3,400,000 CRM users
- Oracle will pay Siebel shareholders $10.66 per share
- The offer is valued at approximately $5.85 billion
- Which is $3.61 billion net of Siebel's cash on hand of $2.24 billion.
- At 5:30am (PDT)/ 8:30am (EDT)
- You can listen to the live webcast here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/playerlink.zhtml?c=67786&s=wm&e=1133996
- The dial-In information is: US and Canada: 1.888.791.1856, International: 1.630.395.0019, Passcode: ORACLE