Interesting article at The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/16/sap_sybase_why/

Excerpt:
"Returning to Ellison's 12-year-old comment about the database biz, he
singled out Informix alongside Sybase as companies Oracle could probably
afford to ignore.

By 2005 Informix was folded into the Big Blue family and the logic follows
that had Microsoft made a play for Sybase around the mid-noughties then
perhaps it would still, in its own small way, be able to look like a serious
contender up against Oracle.

But SAP betting on a fairly anonymous firm that in Ellison's eyes was an
also-ran way back in 1998, could yet prove to be an irrelevant but extremely
costly acquisition".

Sigh.

Ok... if you follow the rumors, prior to the IBM buy, SAP had also wanted to buy Informix.
(There was a run up on the stock price, but someone said that the board didn't want to sell to a foreign company... Not that I put too much stock inthe rumor.)

The reason why SAP wants to buy Sybase is simple. They don't have an "in-house" database and well IBM can only offer up DB2. And we saw just how many customers want SAP on DB2.

So when a customer is interested in SAP, they look at Microsoft or Oracle.. If they are too large for Microsoft, you now are handing a lead over toOracle since they sell their own series of products. (Oracle Financials,PeopleSoft, JDE, etc ...) So why introduce your competitor in to your sale? (You can thank Janet P for that one ...)


Its really that simple and I'm amazed that El Reg couldn't figure that one out.

But man, they are paying a premium. They'd be better off taking a forked version of MySQL or Postgres and bringing it in house.

But hey! What do I know? Other than the fact that I had been selling out ofthe money covered calls on about 20K shares a month only not to sell out the shares because then Gary Lloyd would have called the SEC on me claiming I had insider information. ;-)

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