Buh-bye Siebel. Hello Oracle-Peoplesoft-Siebel.

Zachary McGeary | September 12, 2005, 11:32 AM

Oracle announced today it's plans to purchase rival CRM software maker Siebel Systems for $5.85 billion, a deal with a real purchase price of $3.61 billion after subtracting the $2.24 billion cash in Siebel's coffers. This deal will make Oracle the largest provider of CRM software in the world.

Existing synergies between these two products will make the transition easier, if the deal goes through. The deal is expected to close early next year.

This may be the type of change Siebel investors have been wanting for the last year. Their final acceptance of the terms of the deal will determine just how much they agree with the planned buy-out.

The combination of these companies is expected to create growth in the sales of Oracle's database product (upon which many Siebel implementations are deployed) and Siebel's CRM product, which has suffered from a lack of growth over the last year especially.