In its rise to leadership of the ERP market, SAP (NYSE:SAP) shrewdly placed bounds around its strategy: it would stick to its knitting on applications and rely on partnerships with systems integrators to get critical mass implementation across the Global 2000. When it came to architecture, SAP left no doubt of its ambitions to own the application tier, while leaving the data tier to the kindness of strangers (or in Oracle’s case (ORCL), the estranged).
Times change in more ways than one – and one of those ways is in the data tier. The headlines of SAP acquiring Sybase (for its mobile assets, primarily) and subsequent emergence of HANA, its new in-memory data platform, placed SAP in the database market. And so it was that at an analyst meeting last December, SAP made the audacious declaration that it wanted to become the #2 database player by 2015.
Of course, none of this occurs in a vacuum. SAP’s declaration to become a front line player in the database market threatens to destabilize existing relationships with Microsoft (MSFT) and IBM (IBM) as longtime SAP observer Dennis Howlett commented in a ZDNet post. OK, sure, SAP is sick of leaving money on the table to Oracle, and it’s throwing in roughly $500 million in sweeteners to get prospects to migrate. But if the database is the thing, to meet its stretch goals, says Howlett, SAP and Sybase would have to grow that part of the business by a cool 6x – 7x.
But SAP would be treading down a ridiculous path if it were just trying to become a big player in the database market for the heck of it. Fortuitously, during SAP’s press conference on announcements of their new mobile and database strategies, chief architect Vishal Sikka tamped down the #2 aspirations
