Ah, rumors. The stuff that makes stocks go up and down. At least juicy rumors keep things interesting.

There is some chatter in the blogosphere emanating from SiliconValleyWatcher that enterprise database vendor, Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) may be in the process of scooping up upstart Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM). Not only is SVW hearing this from a reliable source but it appears the buyout may come at a very large premium -- 50% over CRM's share price today.

I feel like this tie-up has been telegraphed from the inception of Salesforce.com as an organization. Salesforce.com plays in the SaaS (Software as a Service) space, effectively letting both large and small sales organizations rent the software that manages their sales pipelines.

I've written about SaaS vendors previously and how they harbinge the future of the software industry. Combine a pay-as-you-go model that addresses the long tail of small businesses with the sales prowess of an Oracle at the Fortune 500 level and you have an extremely interesting M&A.

As SiliconValleyWatcher posits, it's going to come down to numbers. Salesforce's effervescent (understatement) CEO, Mark Benioff, came out of Oracle and could play the role of Larry Ellison's successor. Benioff knows he has some great assets and is looking to best capture their value.

Is Oracle going to pay up?

Zack Miller is the managing editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund. Author holds no position in the stocks mentioned.

Last evening, Jim Cramer had a brief conversation with Marc Benioff, the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM). Cramer has been a skeptic of Salesforce.com's success and sustainability in the marketplace. He's dead wrong.

Cramer doesn't get the company's business model or understand its success.

Benioff was with Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) early in his career and learned the ropes there. He found that customers were frustrated because it took millions of dollars and 12 to 18 months to install new software and to train employees how to use it. Organizations were impatient with huge purchases taking too long to yield returns and improved functionality.

Salesforce.com is different. Its lead product is a CRM program, which stands for customer relationship manager. CRM, also Salesforce.com's ticker, allows for companies to track customer progress, customer happiness and customer status. The Salesforce.com programs are sold on a user-by-user basis, install very easily and are hosted at Salesforce.com's data center. There is no tying up of customers' databases. All is secured and backed up.

Benioff, in other words, understood the customer's needs and wishes. There are now several other business applications that Salesforce.com sells to its customers.

What have you done for me lately? Those words have been screamed with sincerity from the lips of Janet Jackson for over a decade, and some Microsoft investors have started screaming the same sentiment about the perceived-laggard Microsoft. While still a huge force to be reckoned with, Microsoft is perceived by many as a slow, bloated company that has an entrenched (read: safe) marketshare and is slowly competing against more nimble competitors in just about every space, including Internet search (Google), digital music players (Apple) and web services (salesforce.com).

Let's look at Microsoft against Salesforce.com. Marc Benioff, an Oracle alum that spun away from the Larry Ellison control freak atmosphere at Oracle to found Salesforce.com over six years ago, has shaped his company in a wild and successful way. Delivering services over the web means no updates, patches or upgrades to purchase and install by IT departments -- which is a huge benefit that generally gets the gloss-over from the media.