Update: SAP buys BPM vendor to boost NetWeaver
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SAP is buying a small Indian software company to help beef up the business process management capabilities in its NetWeaver applications platform.It is purchasing Yasu Technologies, a maker of business rules management software, which helps ensure that business processes automated through software are in compliance with a company&#39;s rules and regulations.SAP characterized the deal, announced at its Tech Ed conference in Munich, Germany, on Wednesday, as a &quot;fill in&quot; acquisition that would bridge a gap in its technologies. The deal is due to close this month and financial terms were not disclosed.Several vendors, including SAP, are providing software tools that allow companies to automate common business processes, such as issuing a purchase order or checking inventory levels, with the goal of making them more efficient.But SAP does not yet offer tools for managing these processes, and buying Yasu will help it to add such BPM (business process management) capabilities to NetWeaver.SAP will begin pilot tests of its first BPM product, code-named Galaxy, in the first quarter of next year. The technology acquired from Yasu will be integrated with Galaxy around the middle of next year, said Klaus Kreplin, SAP&#39;s head of NetWeaver technology.Yasu&#39;s software helps companies to enforce the rules that their business processes must abide by. If a company automates a project approval process, for example, Yasu will send projects under a certain budget to a midlevel manager for approval, and more costly projects to a senior manager.&quot;The nice thing is, you can define rules and make them available as a service that can be integrated with other applications,&quot; Kreplin said.Yasu was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees. Customers include the automaker BMW, according to its Web site.BPM is one of several areas SAP is entering to compete better with its main applications rival, Oracle. SAP will also offer software for building composite applications, called the NetWeaver Composition Environment, and developing hosted applications for smaller companies, called SAP Business ByDesign.The Galaxy software will be integrated with NetWeaver Composition Environment next year. Eventually that, in turn, will be offered as a part of Business ByDesign, Kreplin said, although he wouldn&#39;t say when.Last week SAP said it would&#160;buy business intelligence vendor Business Objects&#160;for S$6.8 billion. A few days later&#160;Oracle offered to buy BEA Systems, whose software competes with SAP&#39;s NetWeaver, for $6.7 billion, but BEA called the offer too low.SAP CEO Henning Kagermann told the Financial Times of London over the weekend that SAP won&#39;t enter a bidding war for BEA, and that its strategy is still to grow its two core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically.But he wouldn&#39;t rule out further big acquisitions in areas where SAP is not already strong. &quot;We are categorically not excluding further big acquisitions,&quot; Kagermann said, according to the Financial Times.The company also continues to snap up smaller companies. SAP has bought more than a dozen vendors in the past three years, according to IDC, including five in 2005, three in 2006, and six so far in 2007, including Yasu and Business Objects. That compares to more than 30 acquisitions for Oracle, a few of which were much larger deals.
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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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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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IBM acquires software developer Venetica to pump up the content-handling capabilities of its DB2 platform. By Paul McDougall and Rick Whiting.
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By Sayer, Peter; Knorr, Eric  CONTENT MANAGEMENT  IBM LAST THURSDAY EXTENDED ITS run of major acquisitions, agreeing to buy business process and enterprise content management specialist FileNet for approximately $1.6 billion in cash.
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Oracle has agreed to buy BEA Systems for about $8.5 billion, the companies announced Wednesday.The deal comes just three months after&#160;the middleware vendor turned down an earlier offer of $6.7 billion.Oracle hopes that acquiring middleware vendor BEA will&#160;allow it to improve its own middleware suite, Fusion.That middleware is key to helping customers migrate their systems to a services-oriented architecture (SOA), CEO Larry Ellison said in a conference call last month to discuss the company&#39;s earnings.With Fusion already able to link to BEA&#39;s WebLogic Java application server, the deal is likely to speed Oracle&#39;s adoption of Java-based middleware, the company said.Oracle&#39;s customers have been telling it for years to buy BEA, it said.However the members of BEA&#39;s board were less sold on the idea: They&#160;turned down an offer from Oracle of $17 per BEA share in October, saying it &quot;significantly undervalues BEA.&quot; Oracle in turn&#160;dismissed the BEA board&#39;s counter-offer of $21 per share as &quot;impossibly high&quot;.But on Wednesday the companies split the difference, and BEA&#39;s board announced it had unanimously approved Oracle&#39;s latest offer of $19.375 in cash per BEA share.The board accepted only after spending several months looking for other ways to maximize shareholder value, BEA&#39;s chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang said in a statement.The companies expect to close the deal by mid-year, subject to the approval of regulators and BEA shareholders.&#160;
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SAP has landed a $35 million deal to help the US Postal Service overhaul its human resources systems. According to sources close to the deal, the agreement includes a $21 million consulting component, and
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Mixes with new crowd Oracle is ending its brief acquisition lull with one of its largest software deals. The database giant will buy Hyperion Solutions, also an Oracle competitor in the business intelligence market and an important partner of SAP, for $3.3bn, or $52 a share - a handsome 21 per cent premium for stockholders.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - BMC Software is buying privately held ProactiveNet as a way to flesh out the analytics portion of its BSM (business service management) software. The systems management software vendor started talking about BSM several years ago, defining it as a set of products designed to help companies better tie IT services to their business objectives by automating management processes and workflows. Over time, BSM has become a key piece of BMC's business. The software company is set to announce its fourth-quarter results for fiscal 2007 after markets close on Tuesday afternoon. BMC announced its plan to buy ProactiveNet on Tuesday, but declined to provide any financial details about the deal. Pending ProactiveNet shareholder approval and other closing conditions, BMC hopes to complete the purchase within the next 30 days. The two companies already had a technology alliance in place. ProactiveNet's eponymous software allows customers to collect data from their IT systems, which is then analyzed and monitored to detect any unusual activity. The software can then alert IT staff to a potential problem as well as provide suggestions about how to fix the issue. ProactiveNet can also link service-level agreements and business metrics to the performance of IT systems in real-time. BMC believes the combination of ProactiveNet and its own performance transaction and event management software may prove timely. In the wake of much consolidation in that market segment, BMC thinks many customers may be re-evaluating their current vendor and ready to migrate to its offerings. BMC's prime competitors are CA,Â Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. Founded in 1997, ProactiveNet has its headquarters in Santa Clara, California, and employs over 120 staff in the U.S. and its offices in India and the U.K. The company's customers include ETrade, Hoover's Online, MoneyGram and McKesson. ProactiveNet has raised over $50 million in funding from a variety of venture capital companies and also counts Sun MicrosystemsÂ and Nissho Electronics as its corporate investors. BMC expects to take on all ProactiveNet staff. Â
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(InfoWorld) - SAP reported anÂ 8 percent jump in its second-quarter net income on Thursday, helped by a sharp increase in revenue from new software licenses. Net income for the quarter was â¬449 million ($605 million as of June 30, the last day of the period being reported), up from â¬415 million in the second quarter last year. That was equal to earnings of â¬0.37 per share, up from â¬0.34 per share a year earlier. Revenue from new software licenses climbed 18 percent to â¬715 million, from â¬604 million last year. Total revenue, including maintenance fees, support and other services, climbed 10 percent to â¬2.4 billion, up from â¬2.2 billion in the second quarter of 2006. The results were better than some analysts expected and showed that SAP is continuing to add new customers even while its main rival, Oracle, grows its applications business throughÂ acquisitions. For the comparable period, its financial quarter ending May 31,Â Oracle increased revenueÂ from new applications licenses by 13 percent, to $641 million. In SAP's biggest market -- Europe, the Middle East, and Africa -- total revenue was up by 12 percent, to â¬1.27 billion. Growth in the Americas, dragged down by the strong euro against the U.S. dollar, was just 6 percent, to give revenue of â¬853 million. SAP continues to grow fastest in Asia, where revenue climbed 20 percent to â¬304 million. CEO Henning Kagermann called it "an excellent quarter." SAP will continue to invest heavily in new products for the midmarket, he said in a statement. The company is spending â¬300 million to â¬400 million over two years to develop a new suite of on-demand applications, intended to offset slower growth from large enterprises. The results come as SAP continues toÂ battle Oracle in U.S. courtÂ for alleged corporate theft. Oracle charged that SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary hacked into Oracle's customer support Web site and downloaded software fixes and support materials for Oracle's PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications. SAP planned to use the materials to offer cut-rate services to Oracle customers, according to Oracle's lawsuit. In its response last month, SAP admitted that TomorrowNow employees had made someÂ "inappropriate" downloadsÂ of Oracle materials. But it played down the extent of the transgressions and said SAP itself did not have access to the materials. A case management conference is set for September. Â
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SAP AG announced two updates to the Master Data Management (MDM) component of its NetWeaver integration and application platform on Tuesday. The updates, which will appear by the end of the year, are designed to make it easier to synchronize data between different systems. Two other new NetWeaver enhancements, faster searching of corporate data and more robust handling of errors in Java applications, will only appear in the next release of NetWeaver, planned for 2005, the company said at the SAP TechEd conference in San Diego.
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In a deal that could expand its identity and access management (IAM) portfolio, Computer Associates (Quote, Chart) is buying software security developer Netegrity for $430 million in cash.
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NetManage (Quote, Chart) agreed to acquire privately held Librados for an undisclosed sum. The deal would give NetManage application adapters to help its Host Services Platform server applications via service
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(InfoWorld) - Accenture and SAP will co-develop software using SAP's NetWeaver integration platform to streamline the sharing of data among healthcare organizations and applications in a SOA (services-oriented architecture), they said Wednesday. The software, Collaborative Health Network (CHN) is intended to provide the infrastructure to link health-care applications together, said Ken Lacey, global managing partner of Accenture's Health & Life Sciences practice. The companies are still designing the software, but functions they hope to incorporate in the first release, due in mid-2007, include a master patient index, an index of health-care providers, electronic prescribing and links to pharmacists, Lacey said. Connections among health-care providers and the organizations that pay them, such as insurance companies or government agencies, will appear in a later version of the software, he said. The software, which Accenture is presenting as an optional part of its Electronic Health Record Connection Platform, could find widespread use. A number of countries plan to computerize health-care records and link systems together regionally or nationally, while others have already begun work on such projects. Accenture will initially approach health-care providers in Austria, Chile, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands with the CHN infrastructure software project, Lacey said. In other large markets, though, CHN will struggle to find a place. France is "already fairly far down the path to establishing requirements," Lacey said, making it difficult for Accenture to pitch a new approach such as CHN. The U.K. has already begun work on its system, which aims to link 50 million patients with health-care workers including doctors. Accenture has already the job of deploying part of the U.K.'s system, but in March reported that it expected to make a loss on the work as a result of delays in obtaining key clinical record software from supplier iSoft Group. Accenture will offer its services as systems integrator for the product, with SAP as software supplier, Lacey said. The companies will develop the software near SAP's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Accenture representatives could not say how many staff will work on the project.
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Oracle Tuesday announced plans to extend the capability of its system management software to offer monitoring and management for SAP AG applications through a partnership with Nimsoft.
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German software giant SAP is teaming with Hewlett-Packard (HP) to offer midmarket companies in the US a hosted software offering that includes applications, maintenance, services and support for a monthly fee.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP plans to significantly increase its own use of CA's Introscope application performance management software as well as its customers' access to the technology through an expanded relationship with the systems management and security vendor. The companies announced the first phase of that extended agreement Monday. Users of SAP's Solution Manager 4.0 software will now be able to view the same Introscope monitoring metrics already used by SAP's Active Global Support staff to help remotely diagnose performance and availability issues with their NetWeaver-based applications. NetWeaver is SAP's integration platform and lies at the center of SAP's newer mySAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications. SAP customers will receive an SAP-specific license so that they can access read-only Introscope features tailored for SAP dashboards within Solution Manager. Customers who would like to customize or add in additional Introscope functionality to manage other non-SAP applications can license those capabilities directly from CA's Wily Technology division. "It's a tremendous opportunity for us," Paul Melmon, vice president of CA's Wily. "Every single customer who goes live with NetWeaver has our solution with it." SAP first began licensing Introscope in January 2005 for use by its own engineers to both handle customers' application performance management issues as well as troubleshoot the vendor's internal deployments such as its corporate portal. CA acquired Introscope when itÂ bought Wily TechnologyÂ for $375 million in cash earlier this year. Since the purchase, most of Wily's 260-strong staff joined CA including its executive management team, Melmon said. CA is running Wily as a separate business unit and has committed to keeping in place the vendor's strong relationships with not only SAP, but also BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. Melmon didn't have any information regarding the future of the other, non-SAP, agreements. Introscope supports Microsoft's .Net and Sun Microsystems' Java. As well as reconfiguring Introscope for use with SAP NetWeaver-based applications, SAP and CA have been working on a tailored version of the management software for Duet, Marc Thier, vice president, technology support at SAP, said. Formerly known as Project Mendocino, Duet is software jointly developed by Microsoft and SAP to enable users to access data and processes from SAP's back-end business applications via Microsoft's front-end desktop Office software suite. "We will expand the use of Wily for the performance management of all our non-ABAP products," Thier said. ABAP, or advanced business application programming, is SAP's proprietary programming language, and is what the vendor's older products like its R/3 ERP applications are written in. At present, SAP has ABAP performance management data from R/3 and non-ABAP, Java-based performance management data from mySAP applications sitting "side by side" in customers' IT systems, Their said. Come December, SAP hopes to integrate the two kinds of management data into a single user interface using its business intelligence module within Solution Manager to have "end-to-end dashboards," he added. As for how SAP might work with CA as a whole in future, Thier said, "We're very much at the beginning of a relationship with CA; we've nothing to announce at this time."