Acquisitions ahoy!

In a normal monday morning, sometimes you suddenly get vibrant shocks. Yesterday is one. Two acquisitions made the headlines for today's newspapers. eBay, argubly world's largest community based e-commerce platform acquired leading VOIP provider Skype. Sadagopan has a detailed analysis of how this acquistion will strengthen eBay. eBay already acquired PayPal, which is a payment facilitation website. With Skype in their kitty, eBay creates a larger ecosystem for buyers & sellers worldwide. Although my wish of Apple buying Skype is deeply buried into the ground, this acquisition makes a lot more sense for eBay, although still i believe the price eBay paid is way too much. Skype's official news release here.

In an another interesting move, Oracle agreed tp buy Siebel at $5.85 billion dollars. With already PeopleSoft in its hands, Oracle wanted to dominate the entire chain of CRM market. Considered as a best move for both the customers & companies together this deal puts a lot of pressure on SalesForce.com for being aggressive moves on the internet. With PeopleSoft, Siebel with Oracle's back-up, Customers worldwide will have an end to end solution from them. Oracle's press release here. This acquistion already kindled a lot of interesting views around the world. Marc Benioff[CEO, SalesForce.com] commented this as "Dinosar mating" and his full internal memo to his staffs are available at Zdnet's David Berlind's blog.

In India, Oracle acquired Iflex solutions for solutions & software development sometime back and the reason goes like this. CitiBank is IFlex's biggest customer and IFlex's software runs with Oracle database. With a solution company, Oracle will push end-to-end solutions for customers in the banking,financial & insurance verticals.

Interesting comparisions here. Skype has been acquired at a price of $2.6 billion plus eBay stock, total worth of around $4 billion dollars. Siebel's cost to Oracle is $5.85 billion. One is a web-based, internet driven application whose lifetime is hardly 24 months. Siebel on the other hand considers to be enterprise CRM software application provider with 4000 application customers and 3,400,000 end customers. Skype adds 150,000 customers everyday and presently has 25 million subscribers to their rolls. This clearly symbolises that web applications will grow faster, larger and slowly becoming smarter. The world moves towards creating strong web applications whose value is greater than enterprise applications. This may be a vague comparison but world requires more and more simplified web based applications with ease of use than complex desktop driven applications.

With Microsoft, Yahoo, Google are sharpening their strategies on the VOIP solutions, it is very interesting & a hot game to watch on how Skype will evolve. In the same magnitude, it will be doubly interesting how enterprises will cope up with a single monster goliath like Oracle for enterprise applications. World surely is getting hotter even without global warming.