News breaking that the hammer has finally dropped on the long rumored SAP/Business Objects takeover, with the announcement of the $6.8B deal today. Even though this possibility has been talked about for months, it's still somewhat of a surprise to see the news, as well as the amount of the transaction, which is quite a premium for BOBJ stockholders.
Other releases out talk about little restructuring at the outset, and of some of the senior management appointments, particular about Bernard Liautaud and John Schwarz on the SAP Executive Committee. Additionally, SAP will operate Business Objects as a "stand alone" entity, which makes sense since most BOBJ customers utilize both SQL Server as well as Oracle as their database infrastructure.On the performance management side of the world, things are super messy. Both companies are right in the middle of integration of previous acquisitions (SAP of Pilot and OutlookSoft, Business Objects of Cartesis), and now there really IS a lot of overlapping technology there, particularly on the planning side of things.
We'll dig into this more in the coming days, but it doesn't get any bigger than this. Which is actually good timing for this minor little press release also out today on Business Objects missing their number this past quarter--bye for now!
4 comments:
Woo hoo for shareholders! Kind of puts the recent drunken sailor spending on the re-branding effort in a whole new light....like spending your savings on a housing development of igloos at the North Pole the day before the Polar ice caps melt...not that I'm saying it's a bad thing...
Or was that rebranding the little red dress that helped persuade the groom to make the big leap? As you say, shareholders (and I'm one of them) aren't complaining :-)
Very true. Wouldn't be the first nor the last time a strong brand wooed a buyer. And as a passionate brand marketer, I applaud the effort to make software more emotional and human. Hopefully some of that can carry over and continue.
I have been specializing in integrating Crystal Reports with SAP BW for the past five years. Bottom line: when implemented correctly, it's a terrific solution for the business end user. It requires a savvy analyst or IT developer to create the content and publish it to the web, but the tool is much more robust and easier to work with than the BI tools provided by SAP. But then, of course, that's why SAP bought Business Objects. Once the dust settles on this there are going to be a lot of happy end users out there.
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