Using coordinated press conferences in Boston and Frankfurt today, SAP and Sybase finally came together to share their strategy and joint product directions for the newly combined companies. Sybase's "unwired enterprise" initiative has survived the company's acquisition, which took place back on May 12 of this year. Together, the two vendors are aiming to position their joint IT stacks as a winning combination for managing enterprise applications, business analytics, and mobile infrastructure.
SAP says that it has recognized the strength of Sybase's existing business model and that it can now confirm that Sybase will be run as a separate, independent business unit — and that customer investments in Sybase products will be preserved and supported.
Taking Sybase CEO John Chen's unwired enterprise concept forward, SAP will work jointly with Sybase to co-innovate in three key areas: enterprise mobility, business analytics, and enterprise information management (EIM).
Within the next nine months, the companies say they will bring together technologies to deliver a 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.
SAP and Sybase say that they will now be focused on porting, certifying, and optimizing the SAP Business Suite and other solutions onto Sybase data-management servers. The companies will also offer optimized high-performance business analytics infrastructure tapping SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI) solutions on to 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) and onward to consumption (query reporting and analytics, scorecarding, dashboarding, OLAP tools, mobile BI).
SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe issued the joint statement: "The product roadmap and go-forward strategy we are sharing today positions SAP to be the only company enabled to deliver a full suite of enterprise software and next-generation business intelligence on any device at any time."
In return, Sybase CEO John Chen said, "Working alongside SAP, we will take mobility to the next level by extending analytics and bringing our technologies to new vertical markets."
Gartner predicts that by 2014, there will be a 90 percent mobile penetration rate and 6.5 billion mobile connections. SAP clearly views this as further justification for investment in a company as focused on the mobile space as Sybase claims to be.
