Stifel On Salesforce M&A Talk: 'Will The Empire And Rebel Alliance Finally Unite?'

In a report published Thursday, Stifel analysts maintained a Buy rating on

, while raising the price target from $78 to $83. The analysts believe that any debate around a possible suitor of salesforce.com has to begin with a discussion of the company's long-time rival

. "It checks a lot of the necessary boxes that might actually force salesforce.com to consider a union of dominance on both the infrastructure and the application front. Bay Area tech titan? Check. Enterprise dominance? Check. Similar vision for the Cloud? Not historically, no, but now, that is the case, yes," the report by Stifel noted. Mr. Benioff is unlikely to "simply agree" to a merger with Oracle, unless he were to take command of the combined entity. Therefore, "any serious combination of these two entities" would need to draft a succession plan where "Mr. Benioff would take the reins from Mr. Ellison over time," the analysts wrote. Oracle would be able to get the highest revenue and cost synergies out of the deal. This would enable the company to offer the highest bid. The merged entity would have a sales and marketing line, "where we could easily see room for $1.0-1.5bn in related synergies between the two companies," the analysts commented. The report added, however, that one should not "rule out"

and that this company could be "the first mover" in this case.