SAP Skirts Antritrust Issues with Success Factors, Bright Year Ahead
SAP has come a long way in the past year, expanding into new rapidly growing areas in hopes of boosting revenue. The software maker has been modernizing its portfolio to address current trends among enterprise customers, and M&A played a key role in this strategy.
This month the company announced one of its most significant investments in 2011: the acquisition of cloud-based HR software SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. Demand is growing for platform-agnostic solutions as workers become increasingly dependent on mobile devices to carry out their jobs, and SAP decided to dive in. It had some good news too recently: the feds have removed the waiting period required after mergers by the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, after the deal passed an early inspection of potential antitrust issues.
The buyout of Right Hemisphere in September served the same purpose: to expand this approach by adding mobile productivity tools to SAP’s portfolio. Right Hemisphere offers 3Dvisualization and collaboration software.
Another one of SAP’s mobile ventures is a still in development corporate app store first introduced in November. At the time it had a selection of 30 different apps designed for various tasks within the enterprise such as CRM and field work.
The second major trend that SAP got itself into in 2011 is analytics. The company did so by introducing the HANA in-memory appliance, which – after seeing a lot of demand building up within a few months – it launched into general availability worldwide. The business software maker didn’t miss out on the cloud either, later introducing a cloud version of the platform at the TechEd 2011 gathering.
A more recent cloud initiative by the company is a partnership with Google to integrate SAP ByDesign with G-Apps and the Google App Engine. The relationship will span a number of areas. Among them is a plan to tap the Android developer community with the upcoming joint offering, and establishing a connection between the companies and one another’s partners.
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