salesforce'com CEO Mark Benioff, a former Oracle executive, can be relied upon to provide provocative comments with respect to his company and competition, particularly so with respect to rivals Oracle and Siebel Systems.

Below are initial comments he made in a note to employees in reaction to hearing that his two rivals have now combined into a single company by dint of Oracle aquiring Siebel for $5.85 billion. (It should be noted that Benioff has a home in Hawaii and is known for his wearing of Hawaiian shirts.) His comments follow:



Marc Benioff

"Oracle put Siebel investors out of their misery today. We have been doing that for Siebel customers for years.

Our announcement today at Dreamforce will accelerate that. It's the end of software.

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.

Now, the opportunity to be the global leader in the CRM market has opened for salesforce.com. Our dream is becoming a reality as the world will move to new on demand solutions. Already the fastest growing public CRM company in the world, with over 50% market share in On Demand CRM, salesforce.com is well poised to become the world’s new global CRM leader.

It is auspicious that this is the very day that we are announcing our new strategy at Dreamforce with AppExchange (www.appexchange.com) and our Winter '06 release.

Aloha,

Marc"