"Oracle put Siebel investors out of their misery today," SalesForce.com's Marc Benioff (pictured) declared today to his employees and management team as Oracle agreed to buy Siebel for $10.66 a share. "We have been doing that for Siebel customers for years."

SalesForce.com's announcement today at its Dreamforce even will accelerate that, Benioff said, adding: "It's the end of software."

Benioff's anti-Oracle bias reverberated through his next words:

"Client/Server software is being consolidated by Oracle just as mainframe software was consolidated by Computer Associates. Oracle's strategy is simple. Instead of innovating, buy as much installed software as possible, call it all Oracle Fusion, and make sure it all uses Oracle's database. Now, the same thing that happened to Peoplesoft will happen to Siebel, it will die.  Customers will look for new solutions and new providers.  Employees will look for new employers. Siebel on Demand, a joint venture between Siebel and IBM, will be the first to be buried. Siebel on Demand is written exclusively on DB2 and Websphere and runs in IBM data centers. Oracle will kill it. Oracle does not sell DB2."

Ever the contrarian, Benioff sought today to spin Oracle's acquisition of Siebel as a major opportunity for his own company.

"It is auspicious," Benioff concluded, "that this is the very day that we are announcing our new strategy at Dreamforce with AppExchange and our Winter '06 release."

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