Wal-Mart Buys SAP Financials
600658
Wal-Mart acquired SAP's ERP Financials to support its global expansion and to replace its legacy financial systems.
110106
Wal-Mart , the world's largest retailer, said on Monday it acquired a 35 percent stake in Chinese supercenter operator Bounteous Company Ltd., expanding its presence in the world's most populous country.
570304
General Electric Co. , with businesses from lighting to jet engines, agreed to buy 147 properties across the United States from a fund run by the Trammell Crow family's investment firm for $2.2 billion.
202527
Johnson &amp; Johnson has made a deal to buy Guidant Corp. a producer of medical equipment for patients with heart and circulatory illnesses, for $24 billion in stock and cash.
611958
The German business software maker SAP (NYSE: SAP) says sales in Europe were flat in the last quarter of 2004, which pushed its shares down in trading. Still, the company met expectations as revenue from software licenses grew 8 percent compared to a year ago.
490419
Purchase of Pilot Software part of SAP's ongoing strategy to expand product line via acquisitions.
425481
(InfoWorld) - As Oracle executives patted themselves on the back for their company's reporting another strong financial quarter, they also couldn't resist having a go at prime applications rival SAP. "Oracle had another very strong quarter," Safra Catz, co-president and chief financial officer at Oracle, said Tuesday during a conference call with analysts to discuss the vendor's fiscal 2007Â first-quarter results. "We had our strongest first-quarter license growth in more than five years by gaining market share," she added. Charles Phillips, co-president of Oracle, said the company had won 88 deals going head-to-head with SAP during the quarter, including customer wins with Electrolux, Lockheed Martin, and U.S. Steel. Some of the business is what he termed "winbacks" of business Oracle had previously lost to SAP, including a strategic win at Wal-Mart Stores. In recent months, the bitterÂ competitive back-and-forthÂ between Oracle and SAP has reached a crescendo. Oracle jumped on SAP's July announcement ofÂ lower than expected salesÂ and cited it as proof that the applications vendor's growth had stalled. SAP retorted that the results were a slight blip and not indicative of a major issue with its performance, which it believes remains strong. Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive officer, cites two factors that he believes are working in Oracle's favor over SAP: its Java-based middleware and its aggressive focus on getting industry-specific expertise and products through acquisitions. Ellison claimed that Oracle's Fusion middleware is "years ahead" of SAP's NetWeaver integration platform. "NetWeaver is still relatively new and still incomplete," he said. Oracle's so-called "hot pluggable" or component-based Fusion middleware strategy is paying off, Phillips said. Typically, the company sells one or two of its middleware components into a customer account with the hope that over time that customer will expand their use of Oracle's middleware. Turning to applications, Ellison criticized SAP's recent decision toÂ retain the current versionÂ of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, mySAP ERP 2005, through 2010 and provide new functionality through regularly issued optional enhancement packages. "SAP has delayed the next release of its applications until 2010," he said. "They'll be two full years behind our Fusion release." Oracle is working on a new suite of enterprise applications, known as Project Fusion, which is due out in 2008. By contrast, SAP executives have positioned the company's move to a more modular approach to product upgrades as being driven by customers' demands to pick and choose functionality. This quarter will be the last time Oracle provides separate database and middleware growth figures, Catz said. In the first quarter, database revenue grew 10 percent, while middleware rose 56 percent. In future, Oracle will adopt the practice of IBM and Microsoft and not break out those sales, she said. Looking to the second quarter, Catz expects Oracle's net income to grow by between 13 percent and 17 percent as revenue increases by 22 to 24 percent. She forecast earnings per share (EPS) of $0.22. Those predictions don't take into account any specific charges likely to occur in the quarter.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
639557
-- Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, said Tuesday its renewed focus on low prices paid off with a 4 percent rise in profit for its fourth quarter as holiday shoppers bought discounted groceries and home electronics as well as health and wellness products.
402841
The US Postal Service has awarded SAP a $35 million contract to supply a new human-resources system. SAP has benefited from a series of big customer wins this year, showing strong revenue growth
672413
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.
127625
U.S. stocks rose on Tuesday as retail  shares like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT.N got a lift from  better-than-expected January retail sales data and news of a  $3.25 billion takeover offer for Circuit City Stores Inc.  CC.N.
237080
InfoWorld - SAP reported an&#160;8 percent jump in its second-quarter net income on Thursday, helped by a sharp increase in revenue from new software licenses.
126643
Wal-Mart Stores Inc  will spend up to 100 billion yen ($878 million) to buy out minority shareholders in Japanese supermarket unit Seiyu Ltd  in an effort to turn around the money-losing chain.
198013
Analysts upgraded their ratings on Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s  stock, citing the world's largest retailer's plans to curb its U.S. store growth and a $15 billion share buyback announcement.
353383
Children's Place Retail Stores Inc.  PLCE.O on Wednesday said it will buy Walt Disney Co.'s  DIS.N chain of North American retail stores and pledged to  invest $100 million in them.
549296
Wal-Mart Stores Inc  will spend up to 100 billion yen ($878 million) to buy out minority shareholders in Japanese supermarket unit Seiyu Ltd  in an effort to turn around the loss-making chain.
297829
Wal-Mart is to expand its presence in China by buying a 35% stake in discount store chain Trust-Mart.