A quick thought or two on SAP’s acquisition of Sybase. Is this about kicking Oracle out of SAP accounts and reducing the $1B worth of Oracle SAP sells on to their customers annually?
Partly. But it’s not the sole motivation as SAP have had their own RDBMS (MaxDB) for years and the Oracle DBA who’s stakes their economic future on Oracle never rushed to swap out what they had for MaxDB. While I’m certain SAP consider reducing the amount of money they send to Redwood Shores, converting some SAP-Oracle customers and scooping up Sybase customers to be nothing but a good thing it’s not like the traditional RDBMS market is undergoing major growth.
You have a bunch of companies in there who use sky high maintenance costs and voodoo licensing techniques to pump ever increasing profits out of a static customer base. Who’s building Hyperscale apps on these mediocre performing but feature rich RDBMS databases?
Only the vendors who sell them and people who started building before they knew the world was going Hyperscale.
No one else is. They’re all too busy deploying thousands of nodes, running PB sized information stores and flaming each other over in NOSQL land.
The play here for SAP is where Sybase has been focusing the bulk of it’s attention and spending it’s development money. The mobile commerce and payment market.
Mobile apps are white hot and Sybase has a rapidly growing mobile commerce platform which has been growing faster than their RDBMS business. If it’s probable that the focus on mobile applications is going to sharpen due to the proliferation of mobile devices then having Sybase’s RDBMS business is only some Farmland surrounding the mobile platform Goldmine.
SAP is buying Sybase not for the RDBMS database it has built but for the mobile platform it is building.
It’ll be an interesting keynote at SAPPHIRE.
