May 12 2010

SAP Buys Sybase

Categories: General Dave Rathbun @ 6:05 pm

You can find articles about this all over the Internet, so I won’t bother linking directly to any particular one. Here’s a search link from Google that will help you get started.

Executive summary

SAP is going to be paying $65 / share for Sybase. They’ll pay some of it out of cash, and they are financing the rest. Kind of like buying a house.

Why are they buying?

SAP says they like Sybase because of their “mobile presence” and their in-memory database technology. Sybase IQ has offered in-memory column-oriented database architecture for years, and SAP makes use of the same concepts with their accelerated version of Explorer. So I can see where that part is coming from. I will admit that I am not completely up to speed on the mobile offerings from Sybase. In fact, I wasn’t even aware they had any. So I guess I have some research to do.

I have to imagine that one of the biggest “woots!” going on at SAP headquarters is coming from the folks that no longer have to sell Oracle database packages along with the SAP ERP. It’s probably hard to put a value on that.

The market has initially had a negative reaction to the news with SAP stock trading down in after-hours trading. Sybase is, of course, way up. Oracle is also down as this impacts them in a couple of ways.

I’m only skimming the surface of this, as I only found out a bit ago. My final thought: what does this do to or for Microsoft?

2 Responses to “SAP Buys Sybase”

  1. Comment by kay May 12th, 2010 at 7:24 pm

    In fact, I wasn’t even aware they had any.

    That makes two of us

  2. Comment by Dave Rathbun May 13th, 2010 at 8:31 am

    Here’s something passed on to me by a coworker:

    Sybase has a platform called “Sybase Unwired” that they sell as a mobility enabler. They have already built prototypes that show how SAP can be mobilized through their platforms (e.g. See CRM or workflow items in a mobile phone).