Blog: Craig Schiff

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SAP to Acquire OutlookSoft

There is no let up in acquisition activity in the performance management space. On the heels of Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion, Business Objects' purchase of Cartesis, we now have SAP announcing a deal to acquire OutlookSoft. How can end users looking to purchase a business performance solution (BPM) keep track of the players when it is difficult even for industry insiders to keep up? Is this a good deal? I believe so. SAP had to do something to answer Oracle's Hyperion deal. Neither SAP nor Oracle were as strong in the BPM space as the companies they acquired. However, while SAP users will now be far more likely to consider OutlookSoft for BPM, the big question that remains is this: will non-SAP users look to SAP/OutlookSoft for BPM? This is the same question that exists for Oracle/Hyperion and Infor/Extensity(Geac, Comshare).

While the remaining stand-alone BPM and BPM/BI vendors will benefit somewhat from their independence, they also stand to lose potential customers that have standardized on one of the transactional vendors that now have more robust BPM offerings in their portfolio. I also believe the decision process for potential purchasers has grown more complex. While there are fewer vendors to choose from, there are actually more viable options than in the past. For many, getting BPM from their ERP provider was often ruled out as being too complex, too expensive, too IT intensive. That should be less true going forward. In addition, there are still several strong (and growing stronger) BI/BPM vendors to consider. Lastly, there are the best-of-breed application vendors that have historically had the most robust BPM solutions (which is why many of them were purchased by BI or ERP providers). There are actually several relatively new application focused BPM vendors vying to replace those that have been acquired which I will discuss in a future blog entry. These are certainly very interesting times in the BPM world.

On a personal note: I do take some pride in seeing Hyperion and OutlookSoft being bought by Oracle and SAP respectively. I was part of the founding team at Hyperion where I spent 16 years in executive management and I was the co-founder and first CEO of OutlookSoft. It's been years since I've been personally associated with those companies, but it's still nice to see them reach a successful conclusion as independent companies.

Technorati tags: OutlookSoft, SAP, Hyperion, Oracle, Business Objects, Infor

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