SAP: Sybase Acquisition Sets Aggressive Mobile Development Goals

SAP is promising that its $5.8 billion acquisition of Sybase will start to return tangible benefits for customers within the next nine months when the two companies deliver a mobile business applications platform based on open standards that will run on many different mobile devices and operating systems.

Three months after announcing its buyout of Sybase, a 26-year-old producer of relational database software and mobile data management products, SAP brought together customers, industry analysts and media in Boston on Aug. 19 to discuss how the two companies will work together.

There, SAP officials confirmed an earlier promise to continue operating Sybase as an independent subsidiary and that John Chen would continue as Sybase CEO and assume an important position on the SAP management team.

Furthermore, the company confirmed that it will focus its joint product development in three areas: enterprise mobility, business analytics and enterprise information management. The overall goal of this product development will be to make SAP "the only company in the world to deliver the full suite of enterprise software and next-generation business intelligence on any device at any time" anywhere in the world, said SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott.

Before the acquisition, SAP partnered with Sybase to bring the SAP Customer Relationship Management suite to mobile devices. A major driver of SAP's decision to acquire Sybase was to meld the two companies' technologies to bring the broader SAP Business Suite to a mobile environment, McDermott noted. Now the company is also promising to bring the company's Business ByDesign Enterprise Resource Planning suite for small and midsize companies to its promised mobile platform.

It was clear that Sybase was already "a leader in Japan and especially China, which as we all know is now the second largest economy in the world and a place where we need to grow our business," McDermott noted. Mobile technology has enabled business uses in China and Japan "to skip the desktop all together. In fact, mobile is the new desktop," McDermott noted.

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