First of all, I wish SAP had not done this. They have enough on their plate without adding another layer of complexity and chaos to distract management.
But having said that, Sybase is a nice move, if it can give its customers a choice beyond Oracle, and help Dr. Plattner with more resources to deliver on his in-memory/columnar data vision. Of course, a decade ago SAP and Sybase had religious differences over use of stored procedures and other Sybase proprietary features - which prevented the platform from blossoming as one SAP customers could reliably depend on, which led to Oracle's dominant position in the first place.
Even more impressive is John Chen's transformation of Sybase to a mobile messaging platform for most major telcos around the world. If that can be leveraged into mobile enterprise applications, it could be a nice extension to the SAP backbone.
But I seem to recall similar excitement when SAP bought Business Objects. That got much of the attention when the core needed it. The core needs it even more now. So, I still wish they had not done it - at least not now.
Sure we will hear a more nuanced viewpoint next week at Sapphire.
