Sybase to gain more than SAP in India

The acquisition of Sybase by enterprise software product company SAP will benefit the former the most, as the company which has a relatively small presence in India in terms of employees and customer base will now gain access to SAP’s strong client base to go and sell. Analysts tracking the acquisition say Sybase will not only benefit from SAP’s large customer base of around 4,300, but will also be able to leverage the expertise of SAP’s large engineering base in India which presently is estimated to be in excess of 5,400 and growing.

“I think Sybase will gain the most as they get the SAP client base in India to sell to,” a senior analyst of a leading consulting firm in India said, pleading anonymity. However, the acquisition will also bring long-term value for SAP in India where organisations are moving fast from desk to a mobile platform with smart phones and other wireless devices like tablet PC. SAP will able to leverage Sybase’s mobile middleware Unwired Platform’ to offer it as another application stack around its ERP platform to its existing customers in India.

The German firm, SAP, on Thursday said the company had signed an agreement to acquire Sybase, a leading provider of mobile enterprise applications for about $5.8 billion.

Adds Bhavish Sood, principal analyst (software markets) at research firm Gartner, “Sybase also has a database capable of being deployed in the SAP environment. So, once SAP starts pushing its Indian clients to use Sybase ASE database, its impact on traditional competitors like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle could be pretty bad in the next one or two years when the integration is complete.” They can emerge out as a strong player in the database business and analytical database business, he added.

Presently, with its mobile ‘on-device’ software, Sybase is strong in large enterprises and government organisations in India whereas SAP has been putting equal emphasis on large enterprises as well as small and medium enterprises (SAP).