Long on Promises
Email
Print
But while SAP and Sybase executives talk
expansively about what the future will bring, analysts said that the Aug. 19
briefing was long on promises and short on explicit statements about how the
two companies will integrate their product lines.
What SAP presented was "some
directional announcements but not any clear road maps. It's more about vision
and strategy in terms of Sybase technologies and how SAP will integrate them," said
Paul Hamerman, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research. "What
they're saying is they have work to do to put this together."
At the same
time, it's clear that "SAP sees a big future in mobile applications in terms of
the user experiences that they offer as well as the freedom that they offer to
move throughout the country to accelerate business processes," Hamerman
said.
Mobile
business applications and mobile data analysis technologies are worthy of
research and investment, Hamerman said, because "there will be some
potentially breakthrough improvements in terms of using the capabilities of the
device as well as the ability to be touched with business processes any time or
anywhere."
As a
result, Hamerman believes that "CIOs and business people will start to
consider the potential of mobile applications going forward. But I also think
that the market has to mature in terms of being able to deliver more standardized,
off-the-shelf type of applications" because it isn't clear yet what SAP and other venders will eventually
deliver.
For Albert
Pang, president of the software industry research firm Apps Run the World, the
question is whether SAP and Sybase can move quickly enough to keep up with the
rapid development move globally to mobile applications.
In the near
term, SAP's mobile application strategy will
be felt most "among some of the verticals SAP is trying to address, like banking,
retail and telcos," Pang said.
"But
the mobile market is just changing so quickly, will the customer be willing to
wait" long enough for SAP and Sybase to get their full mobile application portfolio
to the market? Pang asked. The move to mobile applications "is a mass
migration that is going on right now. So I think that the SAP strategy is going to be more
effective if it directs all of its energy toward these strategic verticals"
as soon as possible, he said.
While SAP will benefit from its Sybase
acquisition simply from gaining the revenue stream from the Sybase relational
database and mobile data access technology, it's uncertain whether the product
road map the two companies presented on Aug. 19 will deliver the strategic
market advantage they are looking for, said Pang.
"I don't
think that we are going to have a good idea about whether the marriage of these
two companies will bring tangible benefits to a large number of SAP customers" until 2011 or
perhaps even later.
John Pallatto is eWEEK.com's Managing Editor News/West Coast. He directs eWEEK's news coverage in Silicon Valley and throughout the West Coast region. He has more than 35 years of experience as a professional journalist, which began as a report with the Hartford Courant daily newspaper in Connecticut. He was also a member of the founding staff of PC Week in March 1984. Pallatto was PC Week's West Coast bureau chief, a senior editor at Ziff Davis' Internet Computing magazine and the West Coast bureau chief at Internet World magazine.
