Business software maker Oracle is buying its struggling rival Siebel Systems for about $5.85 billion, continuing a recent shopping spree that has eliminated two of its biggest competitors in nine months.
Under the terms of the deal, Oracle (ORCL) will pay $10.66 per share in cash or stock for Siebel (SEBL), a once rapidly growing maker of customer support software that has fallen on hard times during the past three years.
Siebel has $2.24 billion in cash, reducing Oracle's net takeover cost to $3.6 billion.
The takeover further bolsters Oracle's aggressive bid to topple Germany's SAP AG as the world's largest maker of business applications software -- the computer coding that automates a wide range of administrative tasks.
With sales growth tapering off in Oracle's core business of database software, company CEO Larry Ellison set out in 2003 to become a more formidable force in business applications through acquisitions.
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Talk to me: Online auctioneer eBay agreed to pay at least $2.6 billion for internet-telephony company Skype Technologies, a deal that confounds many analysts not just for the lofty price tag but also for what some consider the companies' dubious compatibility.
The total value of the deal may climb to $4.1 billion based on whether Skype meets a series of performance targets over the next three years.
Skype -- founded by the creators of Kazaa -- gives away software that lets people talk for free over the internet using computers and microphones. A paid version, SkypeOut, allows those calls to be connected to regular phones.
EBay buyers and sellers can communicate with each other via e-mail before a transaction is complete, and presumably Skype would give eBay a way to add voice to such chats. But bringing Skype into the fold is expected to cut eBay's earnings, at least in the short term.
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In a flash: Samsung unveiled a new flash memory chip it says will double storage capacity on portable music players and other mobile devices.
Memory cards containing multiple 16-GB NAND chips mean "you will be able to take your entire music and personal video libraries with you," Chang-Gyu Hwang, president of the company's semiconductor operations, told reporters.
For example, the company said that by combining 16 such devices on a memory card with a density of up to 32 GB, it would be possible to store 200 years' worth of an average-sized daily newspaper, 8,000 MP3 music files or 20 DVD movies.
Samsung is the biggest producer of NAND and DRAM flash memory chips in the world. NAND chips, which can save data even when power is switched off, are used in electronic devices such as MP3 players and digital cameras. DRAM chips are most widely used in personal computers.
The company said it plans to begin mass producing the chips in the second half of 2006.
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Rising sun: Sun Microsystems introduced new industry-standard servers that it said will more than triple the amount of the computer server market it can address, as the computer maker seeks to rebuild momentum lost to rivals since the dot-com bust nearly five years ago.
The servers, named X2100, X4100 and X4200, use Opteron microprocessors from AMD (AMD), Intel's (INTC) principal rival in the microprocessor business.
The new servers, which can house up to two dual-core Opteron chips, are in addition to two-processor and four-processor Opteron servers that Sun (SUNW) already sells. The company said that the X2100, X4100 and X4200 are cheaper, faster, use less power and take up less space than comparable servers made by rival companies, such as Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).
Industry-standard servers, also known as x86 servers, are those that use either Intel, AMD or Intel-compatible chips as their data-processing engines. Sun, along with rival IBM, also sells higher-end servers that use their own in-house designed processors.
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Compiled by Keith Axline. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
