News:SAP acquires Business Objects in friendly 4,8b€ take-over
From Business Intelligence Compendium
October 7th, 2007
SAP and Business Objects have announced that SAP will take over Business Objects. The foreseen price tag is 6,8 billion dollar and the deal is to be concluded in the first quarter of 2008 according to SAP CEO, Henning Kagermann .
Business Objects had reached since quite some time that size for a busines intelligence vendor where it becomes hard to continue to grow (as they already had in their portfolio practically all types of software typically required in business intelligence applications). Therefore acquisition doesn't come as a surprise. But given the size of Businsess Objects, finding a potential buyer couldn't have been easy.
SAP has done a remarkable change of direction (at least for its business intelligence strategy). They have do have the habit of developping in-house, rather than buying in, and recently they have invested heavily in the netweaver platform (for the data integration part of the business intelligence layer). Nevertheless, Business Objects was the most used 3rd party business intelligence suite on top of SAP (according to Gartner). Also 40% of the Business Objects customer are already SAP customers (Forrester). Therefore this acquisition seems to make sense.
This acquisition should also be seen in the light of the Hyperion acquisition by Oracle - a 3,3 billion dollar deal. Large independent business intelligence suites are disappearing as seperate vendors from the market which also means that the number acquisiton candidates is disappearing.
This leaves to wonder where Cognos, the largest remaining business intelligence vendor will go? Microsoft has its own business intelligence stack, so does Oracle, and so does SAP. Will Cognos remain independent.
Business Objects will continue to operate as a independent division within the SAP group.
