Lots of tech mergers in the news today. Siebel, founded by an ex-Oracler comes back to the fold with today’s purchace by Ellison. This one makes some sense, allowing Oracle to fill out their product line. Seeing that Oracle just bought PeopleSoft, there’s some good amount of overlap. Also, the structure of the purchace points to just how cheap cash is. Nobody would have offered this much cash in the stock happy days:
Siebel shareholders will receive $10.66 per share in cash for each Siebel share held, unless they elect to receive Oracle common stock, but no more than 30% of Siebel’s common shares may be exchanged for Oracle common stock.
On the other side of the making sense equation is eBay’s purchace of Skype. I’d heard rumors of this one late last week, but now that the deal has been announced it still doesn’t make any more sense to me. Their purchace of PayPal made sense after their failed attempt to usupr them with the failed BidPoint, but I can’t see the reason they want to get in to the telephony business.