HP ditches Oracle for Salesforce?

CRM battle

HP is reported to be ditching Oracle's Siebel product and moving over to Salesforce's cloud CRM offering.

Analyst Trip Chowdhry made the claim to the International Business Times, citing industry contacts as his source.

"HP is completely shutting down Oracle Siebel, which contacts tell us has made Oracle very furious," he said. "Contacts tell us that by moving to Salesforce, HP may be saving 40 per cent - 50 per cent over Siebel."

The news comes just two weeks before Salesforce kicks off its annual conference Dreamforce in San Francisco, which will be attended by IT PRO.

This is the latest move in the ongoing public spat between HP and Oracle. It began when the former pushed out chief executive (CEO) Mark Hurd for inaccurate expense claims.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison publicly berated the company for the move and swiftly hired Hurd as president of his company.

Suing battles regarding contract stipulations ensued but were soon put to bed when Oracle's court case with SAP, over TomorrowNow stealing software, kicked off.

This gave Ellison more ammunition to attack HP with, however, as the company had just hired ex-SAP CEO Leo Apotheker to replace Hurd at the top.

IT PRO contacted HP and Oracle for comment but neither had responded to our request at the time of publication.

Salesforce chose to make no comment on the reports.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.