SAP acquiring Sybase!

SAP has offered $5.25B to acquire Sybase, the database company. I guess Sybase was the only independent database company after Ingres was acquired by Ask and then by CA. Ingres is back to being a private company focusing on open source. Informix was acquired by IBM.

When I left IBM to join Oracle back in 1992, these three were fierce competitors (Oracle, Sybase, and Informix). Sybase had good technology and it really invented the concept of stored procedures to reduce the number of round trips from the client to the server. This made Sybase the default choice for client-server database in Wall Street financial houses during the early 1990s.  Sybase also did some early pioneering work in data replication. Next to Oracle, Sybase ranked as the other database company.

But Sybase could not keep pace with Oracle’s dominance. Hence it changed course to focus on Business Intelligence, and mobile technology during last few years. Under the leadership of John Chen, it has quietly stayed healthy with reasonable growth. SAP is paying a hefty premium (around $65 a share) to acquire Sybase, indicating the value it sees.

This acquisition will bring SAP at par with Oracle’s portfolio of being a database supplier as well as application software supplier. Until now, SAP has been riding on DB2 and Oracle DBMS engines. During my early years at Oracle I spoke once to SAP users and subsequently had a chat with Hasso Plattner, the founder. At that time, Hasso emphasized how important a customer SAP is to Oracle, being a big user of the database engine. Oracle was having a tough time balancing the “friend-foe” relationship – it was a friendly customer of Oracle’s DBMS, it also competed fiercely on application software with Oracle.

Now the path will be clear. SAP will supply the entire stack, from its own DBMS engine (Sybase) to middleware (Netweaver) and Application software. It has to play the partnership roles with IBM and Microsoft carefully.

With Sybase gone, the era of independent RDBMS vendors seem to have come to an end.

An afternoon in Hyderabad, India

From 3 days in Beijing’s cold weather, I fly to Delhi – a seven hour non-stop event via Air China, domestic carrier of China. We land at 2:30am and the temperature is like over 100 degrees. It hits you right away. What a contrast – from 40 degrees to 100 degrees just like that.

I spend an afternoon visiting an exciting US company’s India development center in Hyderabad. The temperature is around 109 degrees and very dry. The heat gets in your skin very quickly if you are outside.

I give a talk to 200 very young people, mostly under 30. This is the  new India with its largest youth population, eager to learn and compete in the world of technology. These kids are very aware of what is going on, from no-Flash-in-iPhone-iPad to the new trend of cloud computing. They are detail-oriented and dive into specific technology areas (flash-based web applications, handle .Net nuke, build advanced analytics on Oracle Manufacturing, etc.). When I talk about the importance of innovation and how that thrives in Silicon Valley, specifically at Stanford (starting point for many well-known names like Google, Yahoo, Sun, Cisco, MIPs,..) their eyes lit up with excitement.

They do want to see India 2.0, a place where innovation is emphasized more than just services. India 1.0 belonged to TCS, Wipro, Infosys, MindTree,.. whereas the India 2.0 will belong to those who can be creative and add value in terms of advanced UI, analytics, iPad based touch-screen apps., etc. Many of these folks have years of working at known companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and Infosys in Hyderabad. They are looking for developing web 2.0 type experience for the enterprise.

Besides the heat, the India visit was great fun.