It's not the first time the Germans and the French teamed up, but this time I think there will be happier results.
It was reported over the weekend that Germany's SAP picked up France's Business Objects in a friendly takeover after it put itself on the market in mid-September. See my blog entry about that here.
The price was pretty high, in my opinion. 4.8 billion Euros, or $6.8 billion, making it the largest acquisition in SAP's acquisition-rich history. But some might argue that Business Objects is worth the price it commanded. However, the merger also gives the market share for BI query and embedded analytics software decidedly to SAP. The other competitors in this market are Cognos, Oracle's Hyperion, SAS, and MicroStrategy.
On Monday, shares in SAP plunged due to some analysts comments about the duplicity of SAP's existing programs with companies such as Informatica. When the market closed, SAP was down 4.6 percent. On the other hand, there's probably a lot of cheer in the Business Objects offices this evening, as their shares rose 17 percent.
Please enjoy this released statement from Rob Ashe, CEO of Cognos:
"Cognos now stands as THE Independent Performance Management provider in the market and is committed to giving customers equal access to their entire infrastructure, applications and data sources. This is a great position for us to be in, and it validates the vision we laid out more than 6 years ago: to be the leading independent provider of Performance Management solutions for our customers. We will not waver in that vision and our strategy is based on a number of key beliefs and principles. The majority of the market will gravitate to an ERP-neutral solution because transaction systems are fundamentally different than Decision-making systems, and secondly, the market values specialization for each of these types of systems because it brings the focus, passion and commitment that customers need to be successful. We will continue to pursue an "embrace and extend" strategy for the ERP environments we support -- taking full advantage of what the ERP provider offers, and at the same time, extending to cover other data sources and environments."
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