I wrote a brief note for sandhill on SAP's plans to acquire Business Objects. Recently, Oracle moved into the BI space aggressively by acquiring Hyperion. I wrote then,” All I can say is that once can expect more attention on Cognos & Business objects while expecting more traction for players like Outlooksoft". Few weeks later SAP acquired Outlooksoft.
BI is clearly one among the fastest growth area in enterprise application space today. The consolidation in the BI space was expected for sometime. SAP says that the primary driver for the acquisition, its biggest and a reversal of its avowed organic-growth strategy, was the potential to gain new business. SAP is racing towards reaching its goal of more than doubling its customer base to 100,000 by 2010, mainly by winning more small and medium-sized companies as clients. Business Objects has more than 43,000 customers, according to its own data, and made 2006 sales of $1.25 billion. It says about 40 percent of its customers are already customers of SAP.The two companies said they would continue to offer standalone software as well as integrated solutions from an unspecified future date.
BOBJ's preannounced less than expected numbers for 3Q07. This reflects the increasing competitive landscape within the BI sector. Analysts infer that the license growth were negative this quarter. Business Objects also offers its software on demand over the Web as so-called software as a service. SAP plans to start selling a broader on-demand offering next year, though the launch has been delayed, and Oracle mostly inherited on-demand customer-relations service Siebel.com with its acquisition of Siebel Systems. Oracle has spent more than $20 billion in recent years on buying companies to challenge SAP's lead in the business application software space. The business intelligence-software market is worth at least $8 billion and is expected to grow by 11 percent annually until 2010, faster than the wider software market. SAP said the acquisition would be earnings-dilutive by a single-digit eurocent amount next year but would add to its earnings per share from 2009 onwards. Next in line – perhaps players like Cognos, Informatica etc. As an aside, would like to revisit this acquisition 12/24 months from now to see how such mergers benefit the players , industry etc. – and that include the customers.
Read the full note here.
Labels: Emerging Technologies, Emerging Thoughts, Emerging Trends, Enterprise Software, SAP
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