Joint offerings from SAP and Sybase

Following the merger of SAP and Sybase earlier this year, both companies have shared their first joint milestones in the form of combined product announcements that will focus on the mobile device, in-memory analytics and enterprise information management.

“The way we use technology will be heavily impacted by mobile devices as well as in-memory computing,” said co-CEO Jim Hagemman-Snabe. SAP has said its three-pronged strategy is to focus product development on on-demand, on-device and on-premise technologies.

Within the next nine months, the two companies will deliver an open mobile platform, based on both parties’ technologies, upon which customers and partners can build their own mobile apps to access back-end data. “It’s about using the mobile device as the front end for that type of application,” said Hagemann-Snabe. “You get that to the market and you can explode the number of use cases.” One such use case, said Hagemann-Snabe, is SAP getting into the area of helping enterprise customers build consumer apps.

The company will also soon announce a new team tasked with driving forward this enterprise mobility strategy.

Pushing enterprise information management, SAP and Sybase will port the Business Suite and other apps to Sybase data management servers. Customers will get a “business analytics infrastructure” that connects SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence offerings with Sybase’s data management servers for discovery, storage and reporting. And, in-memory computing technology will be incorporated across both portfolios so customers can get real-time anywhere data access.

Co-CEO Bill McDermott also re-iterated the value of the merger of both companies, describing it as “not your typical Silicon Valley M&A move”. The mobile technology of Sybase plus the business applications of SAP “comes together in a powerful combination on device”, he said, also making assuring comments about SAP’s improved commitment to customers. “We’re determined to be more and more intimate with our customers.”

Sybase CEO John Chen, who will continue to head the independent Sybase business, added the combination is good given both companies’ engineers work well together. Moreover, both companies have been strategically aligned for some time, said Chen. “SAP and Sybase have been working on a common vision for the last three years.”

However, Henry Morris, IDC’s senior VP of worldwide software and services research, thinks SAP’s roadmap remains vague regarding how in-memory computing will be incorporated into its enterprise mobile strategy. “It’s really cloudy when they try to show how these different threads come together,” said Morris.