SAP and Sybase today unveiled strategic product directions and planned co-innovations in three key areas: enterprise mobility, business analytics and enterprise information management (EIM). These are the first product details to emerge since the close of the acquisition, which has Sybase continuing to run as a separate, independent business unit.
Enterprise Mobility
On the enterprise mobility front, the companies will bring together within the next nine months technologies to deliver a mobile platform for business that is based on open standards, runs on all major mobile operating systems, and manages and supports all major device types. The platform will be designed so that customers and partners can build mobile experiences on top of existing applications, such as SAP Business Suite software. In addition, SAP will showcase mobile experiences for all of its products, including the SAP Business Suite and SAP Business ByDesign. These mobile experiences will function similarly to what is currently available in the Sybase Mobile Sales for the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application and Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite.
The companies will integrate the SAP NetWeaver Mobile component and SAP BusinessObjects Mobile software with Sybase Unwired Platform to deliver a single mobile development and deployment platform with integrated analytics. New open standards-based technology from SAP that enables easy access to SAP Business Suite will accelerate the mobilization of SAP applications. SAP will also deliver industry-specific mobile applications built on this next-generation mobile platform.
This is all part of SAP’s vision of "mobile as the new desktop" and Sybase’s longtime mission of empowering the "unwired enterprise." The focus is supported by significant penetration of mobile devices in the workplace. For example, the December 2009 Gartner report, "Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance," predicts that by 2014 there will be a 90 percent mobile penetration rate and 6.5 billion mobile connections. More recently, Gartner reported this month that worldwide sales of mobile devices to end users were up 13.8 percent in 2Q 2010 compared with the same period a year ago, with smartphones accounting for 19% of those device sales.
Business Analytics
On the business analytics front, the companies are combining complementary technologies from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio and Sybase for their business analytics infrastructure. SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions are already certified on Sybase IQ 15.0 and Sybase ASE 15.0. Solutions include:
- business analytic applications
- reports, scorecards and dashboards
- data integration and data quality
- transactional storage
- data marts and data warehousing
SAP and Sybase will also deliver business analytic applications that are optimized for industries such as financial services, consumer products, retail and manufacturing.
SAP in-memory computing technology will be incorporated across SAP and Sybase data management offerings. SAP has already announced a high-performance analytic appliance as further innovation in the in-memory computing space. The goal of these technologies is to enable business users to instantaneously access, explore, model and analyze transactional, analytical and Web-based data in real time in a single environment from anywhere, anytime, using any device.
Enterprise Information Management
In enterprise information management, the offerings will include
- data integration and data quality
- master data management
- complex event processing (CEP)
- real-time replication
- modeling
- application development
- database capabilities
Sybase ASE database engine supports transactional and mixed workloads, and will be fully supported by the combined companies. SAP will port, certify and optimize SAP Business Suite, the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component, SAP BusinessObjects Data Services software and SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions to Sybase ASE.
