Oracle said a month ago that they were willing to work with IBM to continue support for the Siebel OnDemand product, which is Websphere/DB2 based. As if it’s a surprise to anyone, they came out this week and said “nah, we’re not interested in that after all, we’re moving it to an Oracle infrastructure in an Oracle datacenter.” They did generously offer that customers who weren’t willing to move (and why should they if everything is working fine?) will continue to be supported by IBM. Gee, any idea on which service will get priority from Oracle. This move is their prerogative, no question about it, but what it also demonstrates is that 1) you can never take Oracle statements at face value, and 2) this whole consolidation business is turning out to mean fewer choices for customers.

CRM Blog: The Oracle saga gets more interesting…: “At a recently held CRM forum at London, Anthony Lye, Oracle Group VP for CRM products clarified that customers could opt for Siebel 7 on-demand services that would be now on hosted at Oracle’s own data center.”