Mergers & Acquisitions on Ulitzer

"I think this shows the agility of the new SAP," boasted SAP Chief Financial Officer Werner Brandt, in a conference call yesterday as SAP confirmed that it is to buy Sybase for $5.8 Billion. According to SAP spokesman Saswato Das, the acquisition deal includes over $500 million in Sybase debt.

New co-CEO Bill McDermott (pictured) called the deal a "game-changing transaction" for SAP and Sybase customers.



Writing in his Ulitzer blog, industry veteran and commentator Jnan Dash noted that "With Sybase gone, the era of independent RDBMS vendors seem to have come to an end."

Dash continued:

"This acquisition will bring SAP at par with Oracle’s portfolio of being a database supplier as well as application software supplier. Until now, SAP has been riding on DB2 and Oracle DBMS engines.

During my early years at Oracle I spoke once to SAP users and subsequently had a chat with Hasso Plattner, the founder. At that time, Hasso emphasized how important a customer SAP is to Oracle, being a big user of the database engine. Oracle was having a tough time balancing the “friend-foe” relationship – it was a friendly customer of Oracle’s DBMS, it also competed fiercely on application software with Oracle.

Now the path will be clear. SAP will supply the entire stack, from its own DBMS engine (Sybase) to middleware (Netweaver) and Application software. It has to play the partnership roles with IBM and Microsoft carefully."