One Step Closer…

The associated press just announced that the SAP $6.8 billion purchase of Business Objects has cleared their review. They said that the deal, “would not significantly impede effective competition” in the 27-nation EU… this is on top of the top given by the US which I wrote about earlier.

Click here to read the full Associated Press Announcement

It will be interesting to see how things play out now. Here are a list of the recent large BI aquisitions:

  • Oracle buys Hyperion
  • SAP buys Business Objects
  • IBM buys Cognos

It so funny how things work out. At Business Objects we had the “annual” merger rumors, which have occurred every year for the past 3 years. Who would it be? IBM? Microsoft? Oracle? SAP? HP? even Google? Google – Hmmm that was an interesting one.

I never really thought SAP would buy Business Objects. You see, I’m an SAP Champion, which means that I get involved in a lot of the Business Objects deals around SAP in my region. I’ve always perceived that SAP had a strong “we can build it better” mentality and therefore would never buy us. In addition, we would be so expensive. Since they already had a large set of their own BI tools, would they ever admit that they need something that worked with non-SAP data? They had only made very small acquisitions in the past. It seemed pretty unlikely.

Well, obviously things changed, because they forked over $6.8 billion… that’s a tidy little bit. We were pretty excited when we passed the $1B revenue/year mark at the end of 2006…. (meaning our revenues were more than $250K/quarter). Well in looking over SAP’s financials, they make $1B/quarter. Wow! Business Objects is big for a “BI” company, but we would have a long way to go on our own to reach their size. They say the 2nd billion is always the hardest. 🙂

I’d love to share my thoughts about what might happen or what should happen, but I don’t that it would be very valuable to all of you… and besides, they say it’s illegal to talk about the future or express opinions and what could be/should be since we’re still, officially two companies.

Still, I have to say, since joining Crystal Decisions in 2001, it’s been a really fun ride. I came from a smallish company of 120 employees and soon I’ll be working for one of the three largest software companies in the world. This is awesome. God is good.