In a move almost weirder than HP buying Palm, last week SAP made a $5.8 billion dollar offer to buy, of all companies, Sybase.
Whosiwhatzit?
That was the general consensus of the blogosphere when the news broke, but once the collective head shaking stopped, there were some more coherent musing as to why this acquisition might work.
The VAR Guy, aka Joe Panettieri, wonders if this is a SAP play for the mobile space, since "Sybase [has] gradually reinvented itself as a mobile/wireless database provider."
Of course, mobile is not a SAP strength, and Panettieri openly questions if SAP can hold this together: "But can SAP maintain Sybase's momentum, especially as the mobile world shifts to iPhone, Android and iPad applications?"
RedMonk's Michael Coté has his own analysis of the buyout offer, delving into the corporate culture of SAP and it's relationships with other players in the relational database space, particularly Oracle.
"SAP hates Oracle, Oracle Hates SAP, yet SAP generates around a billion dollars for Oracle each year because many SAP installs need the Oracle database. Sybase has a database that's mature and old-school enough to satisfy the 'it's enterprise-y or nuthin''approach to SAP software selection. One wonders if a few billion dollars spent on forking and then beefing up MySQL (instead of $5.8B on Sybase) would have enterprised up MySQL and put a larger dent in Oracle," Coté writes.
Coté also puts forth the notion that this could be a good way for SAP to position itself around Big Data management, since the mobile and SMS channels are a vital conduit for Big Data, and Sybase is in a good mobile/SMS place.
Speaking of Big Data, check out the recent Datacenter Droplets interview with Bernard Golden, who sees Big Data as one of the biggest (no pun intended) reasons to justify a move to cloud computing.
How big is Big Data? According to a recent report from IDC, in 2010 the amount of all the digital information produced on Earth will grow to 1.2 zettabytes, a convenient unit of data measurement that equals a staggering 1.2 trillion gigabytes of information.
The same report estimates that in 2009, nearly 35 percent of the digital information created could not be stored, because there simply was not enough storage media available on the planet. If that figure were applied to the estimated amount of 2010 data, that means that 420 billion gigabytes of data will never get permanently stored.
That kind of data may only live in the cloud.
Given that Data is Big, how can we puny humans ever get a handle on it?
Novell's Dan Dufault wrote an interesting guest blog over at The VAR Guy about Intelligent Workload Management.
According to Dufault, "[i]ntelligent workload management... is a new, effective model of computing that enables your customers to manage and optimize computing resources in a policy-driven, secure, and compliant manner across physical, virtual, and cloud environments."
In other words, if we can decode the market-speak, computing power is delegated to the workload, not just the platform or the application. Dufault doesn't delve too deeply into this topic, but he whets the appetite for more... we'll keep an eye on this to see if anything comes of it.
Speaking of intelligent workload, InformationWeek has a detailed article on Microsoft's cloud offerings.
Insert your choice of ironic/snarky remark here.
Microsoft has two components to its cloud strategy: software as a service, in the form of SharePoint, Office 2010 for the Web, and Exchange, to name a few; and the platform as a service component in the form of Azure.
"One of the main cogs of Microsoft's cloud strategy is Azure, its approach to selling computing power over the Internet based on usage, as customers need it. Microsoft has some enterprise customers such as Kelley Blue Book and Domino's testing key Web applications on Azure, and some smaller tech companies--including SugarCRM--sell software services running on the platform. But Azure continues to be a work in progress," writes Chris Murphy.
Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft, this article provides a good look into the Azure world, and it worth reading.