ebizQ's Business Agility Watch

First, it was rumors about Business Objects being bought by IBM. Then it was Oracle buying Hyperion. Then Business Objects bought Cartesis. Then TIBCO bought Spotfire. Did I miss any?

Then yesterday, SAP announced its intention to acquire OutlookSoft.

And today, here's a roundup of what "the other guys" are saying about the SAP acquisition of OutlookSoft:

Some say this is an out-and-out shot at Oracle in relation to its buy of Hyperion March 1st.

Including this lead in today's International Herald Tribune:

Business software maker SAP AG on Tuesday fired another shot in its duel with Oracle Corp. by announcing plans to buy OutlookSoft Corp. and its line of technology products tailored for budgeting and financial forecasts.

The deal follows Oracle's recently completed $3.3 billion (€2.4 billion) acquisition of Hyperion Solutions Corp., a maker of so-called "business intelligence" software that delves into some of the same areas covered by OutlookSoft's products.

According to Paul Hammerman of Forrester Research, as quoted by Jon Franke on SearchSAP.com, OutlookSoft's performance management product has a Microsoft Excel-based user interface and integrated planning, financial consolidations and business performance analytics capabilities, according to Hamerman. It represents a big improvement on SAP's current performance management product, Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM).

A bit more from Franke's article, quoting Hammerman:

"SAP needed to address the gap it had in planning functionality," Hamerman said. "SAP had a product, but it wasn't great and it was losing out to best-of-breed competitors such as Hyperion and Cognos."

SAP rival Oracle recently acquired Hyperion and, just weeks ago, BI software maker BusinessObjects purchased Cartesis. Combined with Microsoft's plans to address the market with its pending release of PerformancePoint Server, SAP was under the gun to make a move.

"This is a great move for SAP, and the timing was good," Hamerman explained. "SAP had to make a move, because retooling their offering would've taken too long."

John Hagerty of AMR Research (read his full analysis here!) made a few interesting comments about the OutlookSoft performance management product plugging holes in SAP's portfolio:

"When thinking of OutlookSoft, we picture an image of a solid, highly usable, prediction-focused planning, budgeting, and forecasting (PBF) system. Customers, many of which are divisions of larger organizations, have built very responsive and flexible planning systems with the product. The consolidation tool is decent, but used more for budgeting and forecasting rollups and less for complex enterprise consolidations, which is what SAP customers will need and expect. Yet SAP has indicated this acquisition will be positioned as the go-forward products for both functional components."

And the other pure-play vendors are getting in touch with their takes:

"It's clear that application vendors think the way to the business is through the CFO, but in today's fast changing market, financial performance indicators are only one part of the equation," said Bill Hewitt, CEO of Kalido. "Business executives and managers must take more responsibility for managing information if they will remain competitive," Hewitt said.

More as it arrives!