Salesforce.com: Oracle Put Siebel Investors 'Out Of Their Misery'Salesforce.com: Oracle Put Siebel Investors 'Out Of Their Misery'

Salesforce.com Inc., which has posted strong growth in offering customer relationship management software over the Internet, said Monday that investors of rival Siebel Systems Inc. were put "out of their misery" with Oracle's planned acquisition of the software maker.

Salesforce.com, which is holding its Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco this week, has reported strong revenue growth as the CRM market shifts from in-house deployment to offering the sofware as a web service. For the second fiscal quarter ended July 31, Salesforce.com reported a fourfold increase in profits and a 75 percent jump in revenue. The number of subscribers topped 300,000 in the quarter.

Siebel, on the other hand, has struggled with software sales. The company reported a loss in the second quarter ended June 30 and a dip in revenues.

In an email to employees, Mark Benioff, chairman and chief executive of Salesforce.com, attacked Siebel and Oracle. On the former company, Benioff wrote: "Oracle put Siebel investors out of their misery today. We have been doing that for Siebel customers for years."

On Oracle, Benioff said the database giant, which is many multiples the size of Salesforce.com, is following a "simple" strategy.

"Instead of innovating, buy as much installed software as possible, call it all Oracle Fusion, and make sure it all uses Oracle's database," Benioff said.

He predicted Oracle would pull the plug on Siebel on Demand, a similar service to Salesforce.com. Siebel's hosted software runs on IBM's DB2 database.

"Oracle will kill it," Benioff said of Siebel on Demand. "Oracle does not sell DB2."

IBM declined comment.