More Acquistions : SAP buys Sybase 5.6B

The enterprise mobility market has been hot in the last year or so and the recent news of the SAPs acquisition of Sybase will make it even more interesting.

SAP is one of the leaders in the enterprise software space and mobility is being looked as a very effective channel in this space in the last few years. SAP already has been toying around with different strategies to explore this market ..SAP Netweaver program was one such initiative which, I understand was not very successfull. Subsequently, they have a created a SAP ecosystem for mobility where it has mobility partners such Syclo, Sybase and few others.

Few random observations :

Sybase provides a mobile middleware platform for developing and customizing mobile solutions. However, it in itself does not have the mobile applications.

Sybase rev would be around 400 M and hence the acquisition has come at a steep price !

For large enterprises running SAP, the mobile solutions naturally would be based on Sybase iAnywhere platform and the customization could be done through the third party vendors.

SAP will benefit from the license fees that Sybase used to charge earlier. It may be possible to bring down the overall cost of the mobile solutions for the end enterprise.

It needs to be seen how Sybase iAnywhere platform will be changed to accomodate different customer segments that included non-SAP users as well.

The other vendors like Syclo, Sky will possibly need to re-work their strategies without SAP now ..

Overall, I would rate this as right move that will add the required arsenal for SAP in the long term. For Sybase, its a great exit and a great partner who can take them higher ..