Two contrasting acquisitions took place in the industry. The eBay/Skype acquisition was between complementary players. The other one, between Oracle and Siebel, was more about scale.
eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion dollars. For that they get around $60 million dollars in revenues, a VoIP product, 1000 developers that write to the Skype platform, 200 employees and 53 million users. eBay believes that this product will help improve communication between sellers and buyers and reduce friction costs in transactions involving high value or complex products. Buyers and sellers can do that with regular telephones, but with this acquisition they can get the functionality bundled with the eBay platform.
In the other acquisition, for 5.85 billion dollars, Oracle gets a CRM product, 3.4 million users, $1.3 billion in revenue, 1000 developers and 5000 employees. With this acquisition, Oracle will be able to consolidate the application layer of the stack and compete with the likes of SAP, IBM and Microsoft.
In the Skype/eBay story, the focus is on all the new functionalities that will be made available to customers. In the Oracle/Siebel case, it is all about integration and interoperation of existing products. Currently, companies have to spend money on integrating the various products from database management systems to CRM packages. With this acquisition, Oracle can potentially bundle the two products and make it work out-of-the-box.