SAP clearly sees this as a 'strategic move', but to pay a 50% premium on the going share price for an 'also-ran' database company seems like a desperate measure in their effort to dethrone Oracle. According to SAP, this move will create synergy, strength, and foster innovation. Yeah, but will it make any money?

SAP to Acquire Sybase Inc

"Pays Dearly" connotes a serious downside to some action.  It seems a little premature to make that assesment.  You wouldn't say someone 'paid dearly' for a yacht unless there were some disasterous results of the purchase.  Just paying a lot (even too much) isn't 'paying dearly'.  Maybe it's just me but the title wording seems a little off.

The term was merely being used according to the dictionary definition of the term to imply it being 'expensive' or 'high priced.' Perhaps it's a regional idiom that implies more dire consequences? My personal experience has really been to denote a financial cost.

Dictionary.com defines 'dearly' as expensive or 'high-priced' I'd say that paying 50% above market value is a high price to pay. We'll see if they can justify the price they paid in the upcoming financial quarters.

Dictionaries are not well designed to explain idioms.  I think you'd be hard pressed to find it used in this way by someone else.  You can find innumerable examples of it used in the way I am describing.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=paid+dearly

If SAP goes backrupt as a result of this purchase, then they paid dearly for it.  It may be worth 50% over the market cap to them.  If it is, they cannot have 'paid dearly' for it.

I don't want to be the language police but when I saw the headline it was a bit confusing to me.  Just a friendly tip.

Actually pays dearly means way more than what most of them would pay.. paid dearly is what is associated negative consequences since then the consequences are known..and this is also used in context of situations where a person lost his life or something similar for a small mistake.

Not buying it.  The distinction between paid and pays is fairly subtle.  It doesn't change the meaning of the idiom.  References?

Here's an example of usage as evidence against your assertion:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/13/AR2009101303044.html

Ah, Sybase...took a one time run-away market leader like PowerBuilder and run it into the ground. Completely. The best RAD tool of the 1990s.

Why is SAP paying so much for these guys again?

Sybase may have run PowerBuilder into the ground, but WaveMaker has rebuilt PowerBuilder from the ground up as an open source, Java project ;-)

If you are SAP and your biggest competitors all have captive databases - Microsoft/SQLServer, IBM/DB2, Oracle/Oracle - then you bet it makes sense to get your own database so that when Oracle starts throwing its weight around you don't get squished!

Hi Chris

If WaveMaker is really like Powerbuilder I've gotta take a look.

Powerbuilder was cheesy and flakey - but those DataWindows were amazing....

I'm surprised by this.  Sybase has a big portfolio of technology (too big?) some of it is really impressive (Replication Server).  Is this just to get a Database to go to a Cloud offering???

The market is getting very interesting right now.

John

I do like the new editor of TSS. But i m seeing a lot of personal opinions refected in the posts from the same person over last month or so.

For example term - "Pays dearly". Let the community / time decide.

You can say - i think its too much, what does community think ? But dont try to change opinion of people thru the title itself. You make the CFO of SAP sound like an idiot and i bet you he is smarter than most of us.

In my opinion - somene needs to stand up to oracle.

My sql is a big doubt, oracle owns sun, weblogic etc. Its scary. we need good competition people. !

Stock market seems to be sharing a similar sentiment, although it is an overall 'down day' for the DOW.

On a funny note, I just searched for some other editorial opinions on the topic, and found this headline:

SAP Pays Dearly With $5.8 Billion Sybase Purchase

I swear that I wrote my headline completely independently and without ever seeing this ABC headline. But it seems that it's a fairly widely held sentiment.

I swear that I wrote my headline completely independently and without ever seeing this ABC headline. But it seems that it's a fairly widely held sentiment.

Are you sure they didn't plagarize you? ;)

I personally like the added drama.

I wonder if SAP CFO is smarter then us, but he sure seems more desperate. 

This is really odd purchase.. It's like someone buying floppy disks at a premium. not to mean Sybase is not good.. just that its so ancient and has been superceded by Oracle etc...can't compare with oracle db2 though.. i am not sure if sybase is available on windows..!

It probably has something to do with all of their competitors owning their own database platform.  It concerns me a little because the major vendors will all control their db platforms and standardization may be deemed unecessary.  Perhaps this is good for the vendors but bad for customers, open source, and smaller vendors.

But hasn't SAP already owned their own DB platform? I recall what is now MySQL Max was mostly made from the code donations from SAP DB, which used to be open source at one time (if memory serves me right)

Right you are but I had never heard of it.   Maybe they wanted something closed source?  It would be interesting to know the reasoning behind the move.

>This is really odd purchase.. It's like someone buying floppy disks at a premium. not to mean >Sybase is not good.. just that its so ancient and has been superceded by Oracle etc...can't >compare with oracle db2 though.. i am not sure if sybase is available on windows..!

Hi Pavan
Floppy disks at premium is not appropriate as Sybase is quite contemporary .   For your information, it is not so ancient (present version ASE 15.5) and has not been superceded by Oracle.  It is just that they know how to make a good product but are not as effective in selling it.   May be we cannot compare it with Oracle (in respect of marketing) or db2 (Sybase lacks the hardware OEM capabilities of IBM).  If you are so ignorant that you don't even know that Sybase is available on Windows, it would have been better not to make a wild remark at all.

Sybase is an extremely easy to use database. Suports both t_SQL (Sphesticated than ANSI SQL) as well as ANSI SQL. Coding Stored proc is like a cakewalk. Temporary tables feature is very handy to use. To acess reultsets froma a proc you have to just write a select statement in your stored proc. Oracle stinks in terms of ease of use and intuitiveness. In sybase you can just think of a query and it would work as you expect it to Work. Sybase is going to be a VERY formidable player in terms of real time analytics due to it's Super Hit IQ database (Column indexing architecture) and aquistion of well known CEP platforms. IQ is a monster product in terms of potential.

Mobility--Access to data and intelligence via mobile devices- is another area where Sybase may beat Oracle hands down. They have a commitment to build solutions that can be accessed from IMDs

I agree there are some scalability/stability issues but they seem to have been addresed in ASE 15.5. They had an old slogal 'Wall street runs on Sybase!". Recently I have seen examples where Sybase has made inroads into banks that earlier were thinking of migrating to Oracle.  I guess this aquisition will more than pay back to SAP provided thy maintain same focus on developing features along with integrating and adapting to SAP platform.

I have worked for 5 years at SAP Labs and after that for a few years as an SAP/Java consultant.

This acquisition is not only about the Sybase database. Although it's important for SAP to have their own DB, I believe that other Sybase technologies are strategic for SAP. The main one is the Sybase mobile platform. SAP announced that mobile is an important area but so far they had no real solution. The SAP NetWeaver Mobile was a total disaster and I don't think anyone ever considered it seriously. So they partnered up with Sybase and signed an OEM with their mobile solution (SUP). I got a chance to try it out and personally I think it’s one of the best solutions out there with true WYSIWYG compatible to all mobile platforms and integrates with any backend.

If you look at previous SAP acquisitions you will see that it always starts with an OEM and partnership and then when more and more SAP customers successfully adapt the technology, SAP  takes over the company.

If you search Google for “SAP Sybase” you will get mostly results regarding the mobile partnership between the two.

I hardly can understand this interest in native mobile solutions when you have web, these days offline behavior is becoming unnecessary. Mobile web is mainstream any cheap mobile device can run Opera Mini and most of mobile devices in the market are getting a decent web browser.

I hardly can understand this interest in native mobile solutions when you have web, these days offline behavior is becoming unnecessary. Mobile web is mainstream any cheap mobile device can run Opera Mini and most of mobile devices in the market are getting a decent web browser.

Travel much?  My mobile device wouldn't be much less useful without it's offline capabilities.  I went out of the country and didn't turn off my data fetch.  Had a nice big bill the next month.  I very much like to have my offline capabilities.  When I need to look at my Calendar, I'd rather not have to wait for it to connect to the web (or not connect.)

I hardly can understand this interest in native mobile solutions when you have web, these days offline behavior is becoming unnecessary. Mobile web is mainstream any cheap mobile device can run Opera Mini and most of mobile devices in the market are getting a decent web browser.

How do you explain the explosion of the mobile app market?  Do you see this as an abberation?  I have a NyTimes app that I use frequently.  There's really nothing to it that can't be done in a browser.  But I still use it and much prefer it to the web version.  I've wondered why this is and the only theory I can come up with is that the browser is an inferior platform.  I'm starting to think that having everything run in the browser is an accident of circumstance.  A good example of this is how crappy flash games are.  I used to have to constantly move the cursor back into the little flash area for my kid.  I realized how uninuitive it is to have an application running within a browser.  It seems normal to me having seen the progression of technology but if you look at it by itself, it's an ugly hack.

Perhaps broswers improve and/or HTML 5 will change everything but I'm not holding my breath.

How do you explain the explosion of the mobile app market?  Do you see this as an abberation?

Technologically is a non-sense for applications basically doing the same as the web sites they are related. The main motivation of native crazy is... SALES!! because of the pay-for-my-software closed channel of Apple.

How do you explain the explosion of the mobile app market?  Do you see this as an abberation?

Technologically is a non-sense for applications basically doing the same as the web sites they are related. The main motivation of native crazy is... SALES!! because of the pay-for-my-software closed channel of Apple.

A lot of these kinds of apps are free (e.g. NYTimes) so that doesn't seem to hold water.  As a user, I prefer the app over the web page knowing full well it provides no extra functionality.  Why do you ignore that?  Also, the availablilty of apps is clearly one of the selling points of a mobile device (see 'droid' marketing.)  There's definitely something to having an application focused on a single purpose.

If there exists a common, reliable, and secure delivery mechanism for application delivery, then running applications in a browser would be technological nonsense.  That's really the key to Apple's appstore.

In the enterprise world (where SAP lives), customers have demands. I was involved in a large military project where there was a need to work offline in the field and synch the data with SAP. I also saw a few weeks ago a project for technicians that need to be able to work their mobile app in places where there is no cellular coverage. Most of mobile projects use barcodes as well, and I don't think that could be done in a browser.

All SAP mobile projects I have seen had a need for off line access and usualy for a good reason.