InformationWeek -- With acquisitions being a growth engine for most large technology vendors these days, the pressure is on SAP to buy.But is the planned acquisition of Sybase, a $5.8 billion deal announced yesterday, a good fit?
The answer depends on SAP's ability to execute. IBM's rule on acquisitions, recently articulated by software executive Steve Mills in announcing the purchase of Cast Iron Systems, is that the company be in an adjacent market and that it offer synergistic promise.
Sybase doesn't meet the first test well in that the database and mobile platform provider is not really in an adjacent market.
"Indeed, that's a key reason SAP vowed yesterday that Sybase will be run as a separate subsidiary and that it will not pressure SAP customers to switch to Sybase databases."
So the value of this deal is all down to synergies.
There are plenty of opportunities, starting with mobile access to applications and extending to potential blends of SAP and Sybase data management technologies, including in-memory analysis, column-store analytic databases and complex event processing. Read more >>
