Analysts, however, believe that Oracle has to maintain its ties with IBM, especially to keep customer deployments running smoothly. 'Oracle has to bend to its customers' needs. Should it not do this, it is not going to get the full value from buying Siebel,' says an analyst at the Yankee Group.

In South Africa however, there is a feeling that we will not see that much of an impact, and some cannot actually see the point of the acquisition.

According to Roy Blume, research manager at BMI-T: 'The acquisition really does not make sense in my book. I mean, if you look at a merger such as Veritas and Symantec, it makes sense, the two companies complement each other, and have a wealth of information to share with each other.'

He goes on to say that Oracle already has a CRM application built into its database -- albeit a very simple one. He does not quite see what Oracle is going to do with Siebel's OnDemand CRM application. 'Apart from the fact that the acquisition pushes Oracle up to the number one application company in South America, and brings it one step closer to being the number one application vendor worldwide -- I really do not see the point of the merger.'