Connect – a Simba Technologies Blog

Timeline on Oracle's acquisition of Sun

I was reading an interesting little timeline on eWeek about how Oracle ended up acquiring Sun Microsystems.  You can read it here http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Anatomy-of-a-MultibillionDollar-IT-Acquisition-894207/?kc=EWKNLDAT05142009STR1.  Interesting timeline and also interesting how IBM and HP were also both involved.  In my experience in business, many deals don't happen because in uncertain times, people are afraid of making decisions for fear of being wrong.  What is interesting in the above timeline is that both IBM and HP could have acquired Sun, but ultimately, it was Oracle that made the bold decision to do so.

This reminds me of when my partners and I decided to acquire Simba in 2000.  Initially, I was against the deal.  One of my partners, Dale Reimer, was a strong supporter of doing the deal.  My hesitation was ultimately a good thing because it allowed Dale to negotiate a lower price.  However, it was Dale's boldness that got us to pull the trigger and acquire Simba.  Of course, the next challenge was taking what we had bought and making it even more successful.  I have found that when there are good deals to be had, human nature seems to always make us suspect as to "is this deal too good to be true?"  That is the point where the smart people are able to determine what to do.  Oracle seems to be able to pull the trigger at such times (so far so good) and my old partner Dale was also able to pull the trigger.  I need to make sure I learn from both Oracle and Dale Reimer. 

SAP's BI Chief Juggles Independence, Integration

InfoWorld has published a very interesting interview with John Schwarz, the former CEO of Business Objects who now heads the SAP Business Objects division. Definitely worth a read http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/02/SAPs-BI-chief-juggles-independence-integration_1.html. I have always been a fan of the data warehouse appliance and John speaks a bit about SAP’s BIA “We are also borrowing technology [from SAP] called Business Intelligence Accelerator, or BI Accelerator, an in-memory data management tool that was built by SAP primarily to improve the performance of access to massive data structures inside BW. We have attached to BI Accelerator our query and our search capability, we will probably also attach our OLAP client, so we'll be able to do queries or search or slicing-and-dicing of the in-memory data cube with lightning speed. Ultimately, I'd like to use the technology outside of the SAP BW context as well, so we'll have the ability to do in-memory analytics everywhere, so that's a very exciting development on the BI side.”

The future of SAP’s BIA is definitely something to watch. From past experience, the independent Business Objects was a big fan of the data warehouse appliance. At last year’s Sapphire, Business Objects was demonstrating a Netezza data warehouse appliance in their booth. At last fall’s Business Objects Conference in Orlando, Netezza had a big presence and you even had the Chief Transformation Officer from Business Objects speaking at a session that featured Netezza. Business Objects is definitely keen on the data warehouse appliance space. SAP has been strongly promoting their BIA – I have been to a number of sessions in the past at Sapphire and at the SAP BI and Portals conference where lots of good things have been said about BIA.

From John Schwarz’s comments, he is suggesting he would “like to use the technology outside of the SAP BW context as well”. This to me is a very interesting comment. In the SAP context, the BIA is an add-on to the SAP BW product, which can significantly boost performance. The question is, what will BIA look like outside of the SAP BW context? SAP is a huge and powerful organization, but one thing they currently lack is a strong database product. Their main competitors – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – have major database products and HP is investing heavily in NeoView. Will BIA outside of the SAP context be a new and powerful database? SAP currently generates a lot of revenue for companies like Oracle whose database is used in a lot of SAP deployments. It makes sense that this is something that SAP wants to change.

John Schwarz also talks about integration into the SAP stack and also having independent BI applications. This is also another area to watch.

The OLAP Report

I had an opportunity to dive into the latest OLAP Report this weekend. In the latest publication, Nigel Pendse talks a lot about the consolidation in the BI space (http://www.olapreport.com/consolidations.htm) and he has an interesting chart that shows all the acquisitions in the space. His use of colours on this chart is especially interesting because you see how much consolidation there has been in recent years, as opposed to just acquisitions. In my blog on January 15th, I wrote about the consolidations in the BI space and Nigel’s chart visually highlights just how much consolidation did happen.

If Larry Ellison was running Microsoft, would he buy Yahoo?

That is a very interesting question that I never thought to ask myself. However, when you consider this question, think of the success that Larry Ellison and Oracle have had in acquiring 39 companies since 2005. With Oracle’s stock up so much in that period of time, it seems that investors in the stock market think that Larry and Oracle are doing something right. So, what would Larry buy if he was running Microsoft?

Here is an article by Randall Stross in the New York Times that is suggests what Larry might do... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/business/24digi.html. Definitely worth a read, whether or not you think Microsoft can learn from Larry.