In the largest technology industry acquisition of the year, SAP announced plans to buy Sybase for about $5.8 billion. SAP said the merged company will focus on serving unwired enterprises.
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There are clear synergies between SAP and Sybase across both product lines and markets. SAP expects the merger to help the company hasten its reach across mobile platforms and drive adoption of its in-memory computing vision, which in turn is expected to spur greater adoption of SAP software. Sybase’s mobile platform will also connect and enable SAP apps and data on mobile devices.
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Meanwhile, the companies expect SAP’s in-memory technology to give Sybase the opportunity to improve the performance of its analytics offering and extend the reach of its event-processing and analytics solutions to new industries. SAP’s tech should also beef up Sybase’s core database business, the companies said.
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The Mobile Enterprise
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Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO of SAP, noted that mobile devices are becoming the preferred interaction point with business applications. He then pointed to how this plays out in the merger.
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The combination of SAP and Sybase will give users the option of running their operations from leading mobile devices and will unleash the full power of mobility, including messaging interoperability, content delivery, and mobile commerce services, across all companies and roles and in any location, Snabe said.
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Warren Wilson, an analyst at Ovum, agreed that the merger will strengthen SAP’s hand in mobile applications. But, he added, the acquisition may also signal a shift in the company’s long-standing strategy of growth through internal development and acquisition.
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A Shifting Growth Strategy
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Indeed, Sybase is SAP’s second major acquisition. The company snapped up BusinessObjects, a business intelligence and analytics vendor, for $6.8 billion in 2007. If SAP hadn’t moved on that deal, the company would have sorely lagged behind Oracle and IBM in what now is a…