by CIO Staff

Oracle Finds Buyer for Siebel’s OnTarget Operation

News
Jul 10, 20062 mins
Outsourcing

Oracle has found a buyer for the OnTarget sales consultancy it acquired through the purchase of CRM software vendor Siebel, five months after putting the OnTarget business up for sale, the vendor announced Monday.

A rival player in the sales methodology and sales training market, Select Selling has purchased the majority of OnTarget’s global assets with the exception of OnTarget’s operations in France and Italy. Financial details of the transaction weren’t disclosed. Select Selling is combining its existing business with OnTarget and has changed its name to The TAS Group. TAS stands for Target Account Selling.

TAS plans to extend its Select Selling Dealmaker software to support each of the OnTarget sales methodologies so that existing OnTarget customers can integrate the sales effectiveness software with their Siebel CRM applications. The vendor hopes the acquisition of OnTarget will help TAS achieve its goal of becoming a leader of the highly fractured sales-effectiveness market by 2008.

Oracle announced in February that it would sell off the OnTarget sales consultancy following the closing of its US$5.8 billion purchase of Siebel in January. After looking over its Siebel acquisition, Oracle determined that OnTarget wasn’t core to its future business strategy.

OnTarget provides sales training, consultancy and methodologies particularly focused at the telecommunications, business services and IT industries. Over the years, the business has dealt with more than 500 customers and trained more than 400,000 sales professionals.

Siebel bought OnTarget in late 1999 for about $259 million, but had trouble finding a place for the operation in its business. OnTarget ultimately ended up in the CRM vendor’s training division, Siebel University.

Oracle intends to establish a strong relationship with TAS going forward as a key sales methodology partner for both itself and its customers.

-China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)

Related Link:

  • Oracle’s Asian Revenue Tops $2B for First Time

  • Oracle CEO Ellison: No $115M for Harvard

Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.