SAP of course joined the consolidation fray when it paid $6.7 billion in October for business intelligence software vendor Business Objects, the largest acquisition in its 36-year history.
Many people have questioned SAP's course of action, several analysts openly questioning both the timing of the acquisition and the logic behind abandoning its organic-growth mantra to play on Oracle at its own game.
"There is little to commend SAP's acquisition," Adam Shepherd, an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort, wrote in October, saying that the "perceived reversal of the company's focus on organic growth" may be the biggest mistake of all.
Others, like
Cowen & Co.'s Peter Goldmacher was more succinct: "We are concerned that SAP has waited too long to make a move in the space and is doing the deal from a position of weakness," he wrote
At the time, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann shrugged off the criticism, arguing the merger would "bring both data extraction capabilities and market-leading front-end query and reporting tools" to its NetWeaver business intelligence (BI) stack.
Earlier this year, he said SAP would remain open to future acquisitions because "you never in life should exclude an opportunity in business."
However it has been reported that the merger is already bearing fruit in the form of nine new and jointly developed BI and business optimisation applications that will be available at the end of February 2008.
Along with integrating Business Objects and, perhaps, targeting other independent vendors for acquisition, SAP in 2008 intends to make its fledgling Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, Business ByDesign, to higher levels.
SAP believes this subscription-based offering will appeal to small- and mid-sized businesses that it's counting on to reach its stated goal of 100,000 worldwide customers by the end of 2010.
