You know the two reasons that we commonly hear of why SAP acquired are the database 
technology & mobile platforms of Sybase. But based on today’s blogger roundtable with Vishal Sikka (CTO of SAP) another reason seems to be, that SAP wants to get into the in memory database business - they believe that “In memory” Databases are the future of all enterprise applications not just SAP & want to know how to take their “In memory” database technology to market. Sybase brings the capabilities of turning this technology into a product / solution for this market.
On Wednesday Vishal & Hasso Plattner have a keynote on “In memory” database. Vishal also indicated that they were planning to launch a couple of solutions in this space on Wednesday – definitely something to look forward to & track.
The whole in memory technology seems to be also a core pillar of their entry strategy into the Financial services space, allowing large amount of data to be analyzed in realtime. An example of this that Vishal offered earlier in the day was how Mclaren uses the technology to analyze the data from the racing cars / tracks in realtime.
Mobility platform is a core driver of the acquisition, some interesting facts about the Sybase mobility platform:
- 1.6 to 2 billion text messages go through the Sybase infrastructure every day (i think)
- They have relationships with close to 900 operators, that is 90% of the market
- Mobile payment & mobile commerce platform, which is critical to trade in the bottom billion
- One of the other aspects of the mobile strategy is is the capability to render in any device with native application capability not web apps.
- Potential – Currently there are around 200k UI screens in the business suite, There is expected to be a couple of million mobile UI screens for the suite.
A clear challenge that exists for Vishal who is now the head of Netweaver in managing the integration of these acquisitions into the core platform, Yes sybase was a partner and there was integration, but baking it into the core platform making it accessible to all services will be a whole different challenge.
Prashanth Rai
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