SAP + Sybase = more mobility and productivity
With SAP set to acquire Sybase, SAP customers, mainly in Finance, Media, Telecom and Retail sector will find newer innovative ways to deliver information and distribute data with merger of the two technologies. Other customers will have more innovative process transforming their ERP systems to bring in more productivity.
On the application development side in the IT arena, we can expect niche and newer applications in the mobile segment resulting in better reach of business to customers and prospects.
Enterprise mobility area is going to be a big bet in the coming years with the growing mobile widgets era.
Early 2009 SAP entered into a strategic partnership with Sybase for co-innovating and collaborating to mobilize processes of its ERP - SAP Business Suite software. The mobile productivity applications were built by Sybase to meet the needs of SAP customers with diverse mobile device environments. Perhaps this relationship gave SAP good insight of Sybase technologies and made SAP to pay a premium to acquire these technologies.
The first set applications (not necessarily in order) that can get impacted from this merger, as I see could be :
- SAP Mobile Infrastructure
- SAP CRM, CRM IS-Utilities
- SAP eCommerce
Nevertheless this merger brings in additional development space integration. In the development space SAP has quite a challenging task to position Powerbuilder application development platform from Sybase.
It is quite interesting to watch the development, especially from the product development and enterprise mobility space.
