Silicon Valley Watcher reports of rumours that Salesforce is trying to pitch itself to Oracle for $9 B. That’s about $75 a share.

Considering that Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, has a 74.1% stake in Netsuite; this is actually a pretty interesting rumour. This would signify a huge consolidation of the two largest on-demand vendors.

Even though this is just a rumour, I’d probably wouldn’t dismiss this speculation too quickly. If we look in the past, Oracle has tried to consolidate the CRM market by swallowing PeopleSoft and Siebel. At that time, some (at least Marc Benioff) claimed that Oracle would kill Siebel On-Demand since it ran on DB2 servers. Today, critics claim that Oracle has been slow to integrate Siebel and their future plans for the product remain unclear. Could history repeat itself again? Would Oracle try to consolidate the hosted CRM market this time? Can they use this strategy to repel people from hosted software? It’s not always black and white.