According to Jeff Nolan, a former and well-respected venture capitalist at SAP Ventures in Silicon Valley, Barbetta left the company late last month, but his departure is being kept low-key by Oracle. Nolan made the claim on his well-known Venture Chronicles blog.
Barbetta’s departure was also confirmed to us by another industry source close to events in the BI market.
Oracle refused to comment on the matter saying that it was not corporate policy to comment on internal human resource matters.
Barbetta’s departure will be a blow to Oracle since he was widely tipped to head-up the combined Oracle business unit for analytics. Its unclear who will lead its BI division now. Oracle hasn’t yet issued any official statements on how it will exactly structure and staff its combined analytics division which also includes analytic applications acquired from PeopleSoft.
Nevertheless, there’s no mistaking Oracle’s serious intent in this space. During an analyst call in early February, Oracle president Chuck Phillips said that Siebel’s Business Analytics suite filled an important hole in Oracle’s middleware stack and said the company will combine Siebel’s 30-odd analytic sales reps with its own sales force which also sells BI tools.
During that same call CEO Larry Ellison said the company would focus more on selling Siebel Business Analytics with Oracle and PeopleSoft applications, and not just Siebel which he said was what happened 95% of the time.
Rumors abounded earlier that Oracle’s Discover and BI teams were being restructured to make way for Siebel Analytics as the company’s flagship BI offering and that that it would operate as a standalone business unit under Barbetta.
Barbetta joined Siebel through the 2001 acquisition of nQuire Software Inc, an analytics software firm he founded and led. At Siebel he was appointed senior vice president and group manager of a newly formed Analytics division and drove business to new heights.
Under his tenure Siebel grew its analytics business 45% in 2004, making it the fastest growing BI vendor in the market. Analytics contributed upwards of 20% of Siebel’s overall license revenue.
At the time former Siebel CEO Geroge Shaheen called Siebel Analytics the sleeping giant in our portfolio.