Blog: Craig Schiff

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October 8, 2007

Bet You Can't Eat Just One ... SAP to Acquire Business Objects

This performance management stuff must be addictive. These big vendors just can't stop acquiring more vendors in the BPM (business performance management) space. Coming on the heels of its acquisition of OutlookSoft in June, today SAP announced its planned acquisition of Business Objects. Both fine companies with good product sets. The issue is that, at least in the performance management space, they have much of the same product set. Let's see, over the years Business Objects acquired BPM vendors SRC, ALG, and most recently Cartesis. SAP had its own SEM, acquired Pilot and most recently OutlookSoft. In the combined company that means they will have about six different flavors of essentially the same thing (take that Oracle/Hyperion and your measly two flavors of BPM). Now I know that these products have different strengths and weaknesses. Still, someone has to figure out how each will be developed and marketed and how it all fits. That's a tough job, but not as tough as the job prospects will face trying to figure out which pieces make sense for them, and hoping those particular pieces actually work well together.

Technorati Tags: SAP, Business Objects, Oracle

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