Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will axe many of his company's CRM development staff in order to make the recently acquired CRM specialist Siebel the organisation's CRM division. About 2000 jobs are expected to go, many of them development roles from the Oracle CRM division as it existed prior to the Siebel take-over.

Research group Ovum believes that while Oracle will continue to support legacy Oracle and PeopleSoft CRM products for existing users, the majority of new CRM development will be in the Siebel product area. Ovum analyst David Bradshaw says: "we believe Oracle will do a bit more (but not much more) than the minimum necessary to keep the legacy CRM products going and current. There may be new versions, but once the current development pipeline is emptied, we doubt whether there will be any spectacular new innovations."