I was in Chicago getting ready for the Forrester Consumer Conference (which ended yesterday) when I got a call from my wife that she broke her ankle and was at the hospital.
I was on a plane the next morning heading home. I think I was more upset than she was too. I wrote this overly dramatic blog entry on this that I scotched because it was....overly dramatic. Read pretty well though.
In the meantime, she's okay and I still plan on covering what came from the Forrester conference over the next few days as I head to NY teach the final BPT seminar of the year - the two dayer I do with Chris Carfi on social media. We have about 40 attendees coming roughly from multiple places around the globe - but mostly NY of course.
In any case, an important note:
As you might have seen, SAP announced its intention to purchase Business Objects (in a friendly way) for a whopping $6.8 billion last week in a move that surprised everyone - well, actually probably just me, I'm so out of it sometimes. This seems to be a clear response to Oracle's March 2007 purchase of Hyperion, who competed with Business Objects and still independent and proud of it, Cognos. Thing is SAP's BI platform which was Business Intelligence Warehouse (a.k.a. BW) was a pretty damned good product in its own right though certainly not of the caliber of the entire range of products that Biz Obj. has. What also makes this interesting is that, though there is overlap, there are 40,000 Business Objects customers that are now added to the SAP stable - making a whopping (this is such a big deal, I'm using "whopping" twice - not counting this one - in this note) 80,000 minus whatever the overlap is and that is a huge number of customers given the size of the deals that SAP and Bus. Obj. are prone to.
Whether this is a smart move or not remains to be seen though. While I think it makes SAP a superstar company in the rapidly growing BI space - important to businesses in the social customer era, its hard to say how successful this will be - especially since the SAP "way" has been to grow organically and they have stuck to that until now. They are doing the wisest thing that they can, given these historic inclinations, which is to leave Business Objects an independent company - seemingly the right thing to do. They seem to be leaving the executive team intact too, which, since I know nothing of Business Objects executive team, might be good, might be bad.
In any case, this is a big move. Whether its good or not, we'll have to see. Certainly it made the Evil Oracle sit up and take notice and probably caused Oracle's fire red tail to twitch a few times.
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