SAP Reportedly Had Triple-Digit Growth In BI Market
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TechWeb - The German software maker reports triple-digit growth in business intelligence sales last year.
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Mobie move With Oracle and SAP going at each other last week, Sybase has updated its Unwired Enterprise strategy to help put more SAP business applications into the field.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - New software licensing revenue growth -- the highest inÂ 10 years for the company -- helped boost Oracle's first-quarter financials. New software licensing revenue grew 35 percent to $1.1 billion, the strongest growth of any quarter in the past decade, the company reported on Thursday. Revenue for the period ending Aug. 31 was up 26 percent to$4.5 billion and net income grew by 25 percent to $840 million compared to the same quarter last year, based on generally accepted accounting principles. Earnings per share grew 28 percent to $0.16. Applications' new license revenues helped drive growth, increasing by 65 percent over the corresponding period last year. Database and middleware new license revenue was up 23 percent, the highest growth rate in seven years for Oracle, the company reported. Oracle released a major upgrade to its database software during the quarter, helping to drive that increase. The company had 35,000 downloads of the software during the first month it was available. Oracle's results significantly beat some analyst expectations, including those of Citi Investment Research. Citi expected 20 percent growth in overall new software licensing, 15 percent growth in database and middleware license revenue, and just 33 percent in applications. While database software is the historical focus for Oracle, the company is now hoping to become a dominant player in its two other lines of business: applications and middleware. Oracle figures it is number three in the middleware market, behind Microsoft and IBM. If Oracle and IBM continue to grow at their current rates, Oracle could pass IBM at the end of this year or early next year, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, said during a conference call to discuss the earnings. In applications, Oracle is behind market leader SAP. The companies have different strategies for growth with Oracle trying to sell to its existing large company customers and SAP chasing small businesses, he said. "While we think the small business market is interesting because it's large; we just haven't figured out a way to make a substantial profit in that market," he said. Oracle would have to build a new sales force, products, marketing, and advertising efforts in order to address the market, which doesn't promise strong revenue, he said. Oracle's applications business, with its continued focus on existing customers, has the potential for huge growth in the future, he said. "We're just at the very beginning in terms of penetrating this market," Ellison said. The business includes products that Oracle sells to companies like telecommunications operators. Those companies typically use custom software, some of which they may have installed as long as ten years ago, said Charles Phillips, president of Oracle. So part of Oracle's challenge is to convince these companies that off-the-shelf software from Oracle can work, he said. For the current quarter, Oracle expects new software license revenue to grow 15 percent to 25 percent from a year earlier and total revenue to grow 19 percent to 21 percent. Earnings per share this quarter should be $0.20 to $0.21, up from $0.18 for the corresponding period last year, Oracle said. This story was updated on September 20, 2007
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The business software company surpassed Wall Streetâs projections as the company reported a sharp rise in new software licenses.
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Industry heavyweights snap up business intelligence players in ever-growing market.
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German software giant SAP said Tuesday it is proceeding with plans to invest one billion dollars in India by 2012, where it doubled its corporate customers in just one year.
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Oracle is now OracleSoft, and that means SAP will soon have some real competition on its hands. Oracle&#39;s recent monster user conference, the first that united its technology, database and
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that based on a new IDC report (1), the company achieved double-digit year-over-year revenue growth in the storage software market in Q1 2007, growing faster than H-P or Symantec.
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SAP, the world's leading maker of business software, is planning to grow by 15 percent or more in the United States this year after a disappointing year in 2006, the head of the group's US operations said in a newspaper interview.
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More large acquisitions may be in the software giant's future.
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SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies&#39; software will take longer to achieve.SAP agreed to pay $6.8 billion for the business intelligence vendor in October. It has now secured more than 87 percent of Business Objects&#39; shares, more than enough to control the company, CEO Henning Kagermann said at a press conference on Wednesday.Business Objects is now a division of SAP led by its former CEO, John Schwarz. The plan is to integrate its analytics technology more tightly with SAP&#39;s business applications, but also to keep selling standalone products that work with other vendors&#39; software.&quot;While we&#39;ll clearly align ourselves to SAP, we are equally committed to non-SAP customers, platforms and environments,&quot; Schwarz said. &quot;Our intention is to have a business intelligence solution on top of Oracle that&#39;s better than Oracle&#39;s own business intelligence solution.&quot;The companies announced nine software packages that will go on sale this month and combine products from Business Objects and SAP. They include Financial Performance Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Visualization and Reporting.The financial package, for example, includes strategy management and planning tools from SAP and financial consolidation and profit management tools from Business Objects, said Doug Merrit, the head of SAP&#39;s Business User division.Those products were already sold separately, and the packages don&#39;t involve any significant integration work. They are intended to give the companies&#39; sales teams something to go out and sell -- although customers should also see a pricing benefit compared with buying the products separately, Schwarz said.The long-term goal is to integrate the companies&#39; software more tightly to form what Kagermann called a &quot;closed loop.&quot; The idea is that SAP users, acting on information from Business Objects&#39; analytics tools, will be able to more quickly adjust underlying business processes running in SAP Netweaver, Kagermann said.SAP will also offer Business Objects&#39; tools as part of its new suite of on-demand business applications for medium-sized enterprises, called Business ByDesign. The team developing Business ByDesign &quot;will be able to pick the best from the Business Objects portfolio and merge it into Business ByDesign,&quot; Kagermann said.Business Objects already offered its products on demand and had 70,000 subscribers at the time of the acquisition, Schwarz said. The job of merging the BI tools into Business ByDesign has not yet started, however, he said.Business ByDesign is still very new. SAP aimed to have about 100 customers live on the system by the end of 2007, a modest target, and its goal for 2008 is &quot;to prove that we can build a profitable volume business,&quot; Kagermann said.SAP&#39;s news coincided with the announcement from its biggest rival,&#160;Oracle, that it reached a deal to buy middleware vendor BEA Systems for $8.5 billion.BEA is in a different business from Business Objects, but Oracle&#39;s move to expand itself further through another big acquisition only helps to validate SAP&#39;s decision to acquire Business Objects. It was the biggest deal in SAP&#39;s history and broke the vendor&#39;s tradition of not acquiring large companies.SAP bought Business Objects for its technology, not its customers, Kagermann said Wednesday, although he sounded pleased about the new customers that SAP will gain.&quot;After you eliminate the joint customers, we&#39;ll have by far the largest installed customer base in the world. There will be probably more than 60,000 customers using one of our products,&quot; he said.Asked about the BEA deal, Kagermann seemed reluctant to be drawn away from discussing SAP&#39;s own merger, but he did take a quick jab at his rival.&quot;So far we are competing very successfully in the market,&quot; he said. &quot;I was a bit surprised [by the BEA acquisition] because Oracle has said they are the leading technology company, and now they are acquiring technology, which is interesting to me.&quot;SAP Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker was more outspoken. &quot;He has to pay more and more for less and less,&quot; he said after the press conference, referring to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. BEA is &quot;not really that big,&quot; he said.Kagermann reiterated that SAP&#39;s strategy is to grow its core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically, but it won&#39;t rule out another big acquisition to strengthen the company in a new market.
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A new report from Forrester Research declares that the wave of mega-acquisitions in the software industry is over for now, though big vendors will continue to snap up smaller firms as they round out their portfolios.&quot;We do expect more consolidation to occur, but predict that the acquisitions of&#160;Business Objects by SAP,&#160;Cognos by IBM, and&#160;Oracle&#39;s renewed bid for BEA&#160;will be the last hurrahs in this cycle for super-sized acquisitions within the software industry of vendors with more than $1 billion in revenues and deal sizes of $5 billion or more,&quot; analysts R. &quot;Ray&quot; Wang and Andrew Bartels said in the report.The analysts noted that the market could see hardware vendors like Cisco make major software buys, but said such scenarios do not constitute software vendor consolidation in the traditional sense.Three major factors will staunch the flow of megadeals, they argued.Citing projections showing double-digit growth in global software revenue for 2007 and 2008, Wang and Bartels argued that vendors will not need to grow through large purchases in the immediate future, and will instead choose &quot;organic growth and spot acquisitions&quot; to satisfy shareholders.Second, the credit crunch caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown is making it harder to borrow large sums. And thirdly, there are simply fewer large ISVs to buy, the analysts noted. They identified 18 large independent software vendors that are potential targets and said many of those can be eliminated because of &quot;poor fit with strategy, financial or business questions, high price, or other considerations that stymie acquisitions.&quot;IBM will be the most aggressive with acquisitions and may go after packaged applications, a field it has largely avoided to date, according to the report.&quot;The most likely scenario involves smaller acquisitions of key ISVs building on Websphere. But if IBM makes a move for packaged apps to compete with Oracle, top apps targets could include IBM partners like Infor, IFS, Lawson, or even SAP. Industry-specific targets could include Amdocs, Deltek, and Primavera Systems,&quot; the authors state.Wang said he was comfortable making this prediction despite IBM&#39;s insistence that it has no designs on packaged applications. &quot;Last year, they spent the whole year saying they were never going to buy a BI vendor,&quot; Wang said, referring to IBM&#39;s deal to buy Cognos.As for Oracle, it will buy companies tied to middleware and vertical business applications, according Forrester. &quot;We expect Oracle to make midsize bets in key verticals like project base solutions (e.g., Computer Methods International or CMiC, Manhattan CenterStone), financial services (e.g., Temenos), retail (e.g., Escalate), and telecom, utilities, and public services (e.g., SunGard).SAP will make small purchases to flesh out NetWeaver, according to the analysts. These may include vendors of user interface tooling, master data management software and business process management products, they said, citing SAP&#39;s recent buy of Yasu Technologies, which makes a business rules engine, as evidence. &quot;Additional acquisitions could come from existing partners like AmberPoint SOA Management, F5, Magic Software Enterprises, OpenText, Savvion, and Worksoft,&quot; they added.Among the big four players, Microsoft will be &quot;the least active&quot; in terms of acquisitions, according to Forrester. &quot;Expect the Redmond giant to make selective acquisitions that do not conflict too much with its ecosystem strategy,&quot; they wrote. Possible targets include &quot;middleware solution providers like VisionWare in the customer data integration space, Riversand Technologies in the personal information manager space, and Web 2.0 specialists that enhance its Information Workplace platform.&quot;Software executives offered mixed reactions. Tom Hogan, senior vice president of HP&#39;s software division, said his firm will likely continue to acquire companies, but is focused more on organic growth. Last year HP spent about 70 percent of its roughly $3.5 billion research and development budget on software, according to Hogan.&quot;That&#39;s a lot of internal R&amp;D that should ... generate commercially viable software over the next couple of years,&quot; he said. &quot;If you want to really hit the home run for shareholders, you build it yourself. When we can&#39;t build it because we don&#39;t have the DNA or the time, then we will turn to strategic M&amp;A.&quot;Executives at smaller vendors offered other takes. Informatica, a data integration vendor, is competing with the likes of IBM but enjoying strong growth, reporting this week that its 2007 revenues rose 21 percent to $391 million. CEO Sohaib Abbasi said mergers and acquisitions in the software industry should be examined beyond the size of a given deal.The pace of consolidation is much more aggressive in established categories like business applications, he noted. &quot;At the other extreme is emerging categories such as software as a service, where there is no consolidation to speak of.&quot;Informatica is doing well thanks to the relative newness of its space, he said: &quot;We are in the very early days of the data integration market. Half of our deals are uncontested.&quot;Patrick Durbin, CEO of the portfolio-management-software company Planview, said in a recent interview that his privately held firm, which has 450 customers, has &quot;critical mass&quot; and can survive as an independent.Durbin&#39;s firm partners with various companies, including Microsoft. He couldn&#39;t say for sure what would happen if it or another firm came knocking: &quot;The moment I tell you I&#39;ll never sell is the moment someone&#39;s going to back up a truck with a boatload of money.&quot;
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Microsoft has added new business intelligence (BI) capabilities to SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005; according to an announcement today at the 2004 Professional Association for SQL Server community summit in Orlando, USA.
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SAP has unwrapped a new on-demand business software platform targeted at midsize companies (100 to 500 employees) looking to simplify their I.T. requirements while improving the efficiency and flexibility of their business processes.
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Business Objects, an SAP company, unveiled today the next iteration of its business intelligence platform, XI 3.0.Bigger and in some ways better than previous versions, it includes so many features that it may be a bit daunting to some users.Leveraging Business Objects' acquisition of InXight Software in May 2007, XI 3.0 ties together structured information with unstructured information."Now you can read through e-mails, Web pages, and documents to understand text and extract sentiment from text," said Franz Aman, vice president for business intelligence platform, product marketing at Business Objects.Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, called the ability to include unstructured data a significant improvement in the platform. "It is an acknowledgement that data comes from all kinds of applications and all kinds of formats," he said.The technology parses and organizes unstructured data so that users can apply more traditional, i.e. more statistically-oriented, methods to the data.Greenbaum said that although it is a "somewhat artificial" structure, it does lend itself to data analysis, and he called that an enormous improvement for businesses that have grown so much more complex over the years. "ERP used to be about one activity, closing the books every quarter," he saidTraceability is another key feature in XI 3.0. The technology can trace back the so-called lineage of data in order to give users better insight into how the data was created, what transformation it might have gone through, and whether or not is was merged with another data set.While knowing the lineage of data is a must-have for regulatory and compliance, it is also essential to good business, said Greenbaum, noting that it is a vast improvement over the old days when executives sat around arguing over the data in a single cell in a spreadsheet.The lineage capability is only available to those who buy the optional Business Objects Data Services that combine Data Integrator and Data Quality components.Another significant improvement in the platform is a technology dubbed Polestar that gives non-technical users the ability to do complex searches and to make natural language queries. "You don't have to be a special user with SQL knowledge to find information," said Aman.??However, Greenbaum said that while XI does a good job in elevating the accessibility and comprehensiveness of BI it is also a "bit of a Swiss Army knife." "What haven't they put into this product?" he wondered.Nevertheless, it should also replace all the departmental one-off solutions that are typically floating around a company, according to Greenbaum.While XI 3.0 was in development long before Business Objects was acquired by SAP in January 2007, there are some unique linkages between XI 3.0 and SAP applications, said Aman. For example, XI is more tightly intertwined with the SAP Business Warehouse and offers faster performance when users tap into data that comes from R3 or the Warehouse than if the data was from a non-SAP source.Also, XI can tap into SAP's use of metadata so that if a user in North America searches for Total Revenue, and a user in France is looking for the same information, despite the fact that the French use a phrase other than Total Revenue, both will get back the same information because of the metadata layer.Business Objects 3.0 will be available later in the first quarter. Later in the year, it will also be available as a SaaS offering.
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The acquisition will elevate No.3-ranked Oracle to No.2, behind SAP of Germany, the world's biggest maker of business-management software.
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BERLIN -- SAP AG, the German business management software maker, reported a 15 percent jump in third-quarter net profit Thursday, citing increased sales across the globe.