Siebel makes a buy of its own

Takeover in waiting

By Ashlee Vance in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Hardware, 5th June 2003 07:47 GMT

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Siebel has ignored speculation of a possible takeover by completing a small acquisition of its own and upgrading its product line.

Siebel earlier this week announced the purchase of the e-mail and messaging assests of BoldFish. Siebel has built the BoldFish products into its Siebel Email Marketing software, which will be sold as an optional module for the Siebel Marketing suite.

BoldFish started shipping product in 1999 and counts Major League Baseball as a client. The BoldFish software was used to set up an email update systems for fans, which let them receive info on trades, news and the like.

Fellow enterprise app maker PeopleSoft acquired J.D. Edwards this week, as the software market consolidation continues.

Siebel itself was rumored to be on the trading block with IBM as the buyer. However, this largely seemed to be idle analyst chatter, and we all know where that leads. Siebel executives have been spending a lot of time at Redmond recently, too

In a separate announcement, Siebel said it will ship Siebel version 7.5.3 in the next 60 days. Siebel claims 14 percent lower installation costs, 11 percent lower upgrade costs and a 25 percent performance improvement with the new software. That's a mouthful.

Siebel 7.7 is due out in the spring of 2004. ®