At an event last week co-located in Boston and Frankfurt, company leaders from SAP AG and Sybase came together for the first time to share the strategy and joint product direction for the newly combined companies. SAP confirmed that Sybase will be run as a separate, independent unit - and that customer investments in Sybase products will be preserved and supported.
SAP and Sybase also unveiled strategic product directions and planned co-innovations in three key areas: enterprise mobility, business analytics, and enterprise information management (EIM).
Outlining the first milestones since the close of the acquisition, SAP and Sybase announced that within the next 9 months, the companies will deliver a leading mobile platform for business that is based on open standards, runs on all major mobile operating systems, and manages and supports all major device types. With this platform, customers and partners can build new mobile experiences on top of existing applications, such as SAP Business Suite software. In addition, SAP will showcase mobile experiences for all products, including both SAP Business Suite and SAP Business ByDesign, similar to what is available for mobile sales for customer relationship management (CRM) today.
SAP and Sybase plan to present a solution portfolio for EIM by porting, certifying and optimizing SAP Business Suite and other solutions onto Sybase data management servers, offering customers a greater choice of database platforms for their SAP applications.
The companies will offer customers a complete and optimized high-performance business analytics infrastructure tapping SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) solutions on data management servers to deliver end-to-end functionality from discovery (enterprise information management) to storage (calculation and storage engines for transactions, data marts, data warehouse) to consumption (query reporting and analytics, scorecarding, dashboarding, OLAP tools, mobile BI).
The companies will also incorporate SAP's in-memory computing technology across SAP and Sybase data management offerings, enabling customers to instantaneously access any type of data, anywhere, in real time.
"If you think about the business process, it extends to billions of mobile workers all over the world and trillions of devices, and the key is to get the boardroom strategy of the CEO and the executive management team linked to the knowledge worker somewhere in the value chain of that business process," said SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott. "SAP's business process know-how, the mobile infrastructure of Sybase, and the business application now comes together in a powerful combination on device."
"SAP will be the only company in the world enabled to deliver the full suite of enterprise software and next-generation business intelligence on any device at any time," noted Jim Hagemann Snabe co-CEO of SAP.
Sales will run separately completely but they will be complementary, added John Chen, chairman and CEO of Sybase. SAP and Sybase will look for cross-selling opportunities, Chen said, pointing out that Sybase goes into a market which is very different from SAP and with this model the combined organizations will have "the broadest coverage in the market possible."
To listen to the webcast of last week's event, go here.