Oracle CEO sees benefit if rival buys Salesforce.com

By Bill Rigby

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (Reuters) - Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) Chief Executive Safra Catz said her company could benefit if Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) or another rival bought online customer relationship management firm Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N).

Oracle, Microsoft and Germany's SAP (SAPG.DE) are the most likely candidates for such a big deal, according to analysts, which could top $50 billion and be the biggest software acquisition on record.

Each of the companies have declined to comment, but multiple sources familiar with their thinking have poured cold water on bid speculation.

Catz declined to comment on whether Oracle had made an approach to buy Salesforce.com, following a report on Wednesday that Salesforce.com had hired advisers after receiving an offer from an unnamed suitor.

If Microsoft or another rival did buy Salesforce.com, it might help Oracle in the customer relationship management sector, Catz said.

"It would cause a lot of disruption in that market and so I would view that as something that would be helpful to us especially in the short or medium term, dependent on who it was."

Catz was speaking at a media event at Oracle's headquarters in Silicon Valley on Thursday. Catz and her colleague Mark Hurd were both named CEO of Oracle in September, as co-founder and former CEO Larry Ellison took the titles of executive chairman and chief technology officer.

Oracle has spent more than $60 billion on more than 100 acquisitions in its 38-year history but is "not known to throw around money," Catz said.

The $190 billion market value company, which built its fortune on database systems and corporate software, is much bigger than Salesforce.com, which is worth about $46 billion. But it lags Salesforce.com in the fast-growing market for online customer relationship management (CRM), helping corporations organize and track sales calls and leads.

Salesforce.com is No. 1 in the $23 billion a year CRM market, according to tech research firm Gartner, on track for about $6.5 billion in annual revenue this fiscal year.

Salesforce.com is entirely provided over the cloud with no software directly installed on PCs. Oracle and Microsoft, which were relatively late to the cloud model, have much smaller online CRM revenues, but do not break them out.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has been a vocal critic of Oracle, Microsoft and SAP, goading them for their slow adoption of the cloud, which has divided opinion over the viability of an acquisition.

"Personality is not a factor," said Michael Maoz, an analyst at Gartner. "Marc Benioff is a consummate professional and fits in with world leaders, never mind software leaders."

(Reporting by Bill Rigby; editing by David Gregorio, Cynthia Osterman and Richard Chang)