28/12/2005 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission has cleared the planned acquisition of Siebel Systems Inc. (“Siebel”), a US manufacturer of customer relationship management (“CRM”) software solutions, by Oracle Corporation (“Oracle”), the US database and application software company. After examining the operation, the Commission concluded that the degree of horizontal overlap, as regards CRM software, between the activities of Oracle and Siebel would give rise to no competition concerns since the combined entity would continue to face several strong competitors in a fragmented market and the deal would not materially affect customers' ability to choose between competing software vendors in their purchase of CRM solutions.