Trends Report

SAP Changes Course With Major Acquisition

ERP Leader Accelerates Growth Strategy With Business Objects Acquisition

November 5th, 2007
Boris Evelson, Vice President, Principal Analyst
Boris Evelson Vice President, Principal Analyst
Paul Hamerman, null
Paul Hamerman
With contributors:
Merv Adrian , R "Ray" Wang , Norman Nicolson , Connie Moore , Rob Karel

Summary

SAP, in a complete turnaround from its prior organic growth and "tuck-in" acquisitions strategy, announced its intention to acquire Business Objects on October 7, 2007. This move parallels similar big bang acquisitions by its application rival, Oracle, including Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion earlier this year. It adds offerings recognized as Leaders in Forrester Wave™ evaluations for extract, transform, and load (ETL) technology, as well as business intelligence and reporting to the SAP portfolio. The deal continues the stunning consolidation in business performance solutions (BPS) and business intelligence (BI), driven by unrelenting growth of user demand for information. BI and BPS applications will remain at the front and center of enterprise strategies for performance optimization and competitive differentiation for the foreseeable future. The pending acquisition of Business Objects is an enormously complicated undertaking for SAP, however — not only culturally, but also in terms of products and partnerships.

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