Business Objects Acquired!
It’s official! On October 7th, SAP announced a friendly takeover of Business Objects. Check out the press release here. In an earlier post, called Scarce Decision Support Analytics, I cited another news release where Business Objects published the results of a survey showing that Executives do not have the necessary data to make fact-based decisions. Great timing on the survey results!
This acquisition by SAP will fill in the business intelligence and reporting hole that currently exists in their portfolio. Plus, if SAP wants to double their market by 2010, as they stated in 2005, they aren’t going to do it organically. Kind of reminds me of Oracle’s acquisitions of Siebel and Hyperion. Unlike Oracle’s acquisitions where Hyperion and Siebel both promote analytics, I think SAP will come out ahead by not overlapping products. The Business Intelligence marketplace is starting to become smaller and smaller!
Details:
¨ SAP Purchased BOBJ for roughly $6.8 billion
¨ Business Objects to operate as a stand-alone
¨ Deal to be completed by 1Q 2008
¨ When trading opened on 10/8:
o SAP down 5%,
o BOBJ up 20+%
Another interesting point is that Business Objects has done very well with mid-market customers and I’m sure SAP sees this as an opportunity to boost growth quickly. In my opinion, this is a good business decision because they fill a gap and buy a lot of customers at the same time. The initial reaction around the techie world is that this is a great move by SAP. Business Objects is a leader in Business Intelligence and gives SAP customers another [known] product to analyze data in SAP repositories. After all, probably the biggest challenge in recent years is the ability to effectively report from an ERP system. Let’s see if they can pull it off!
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