BOBJ-Business Objects and SAP-SAP are now joined but nobody yet knows exactly how – and more importantly how well. But if you take a look at this savvy combination of AJAX and Flash technology that BOBJ has on display at this Web address:
one can clearly see that along with Saps own NetWeaver, plus BOBJs fast evolving metadata, security, and identity infrastucture – SAP has loaded on the necessary (but by no means sufficient) conditions and software to become a major Enterprise IT player in the rapidly consolidating World of Top Tier IT Vendors.
Heretofore, SAP has always been in that IT Top Tier; but before Net Weaver and BOBJ acquisitions, SAP was in danger of being readily ousted. Now the question is will HP and Sun make it into that final grouping. Sun would appear to be a cant miss with all its very strong Open Source assets. But I am from across the Mississippi from Missouri, and like Wall Streeters I still dont see how the software revenue streams can be guaranteed let alone grown – a BI or BPM M+A would certainly help since those are premium services that are price inelastic but also would helps sell Sun storage and servers. And as for HP, they need a better software base to stay on top of their hardware+services game, especially on the server/storage/networking side – so I expect either BI (Microstrategy or Cognos) or BPM/middleware(Tibco or BEA) to be possible targets for HP. But Microsofts free BI giveaway pricing (matched substantially by IBM and Oracle) has just about doomed pure-play BI vendors – oh not to be the vendors missed in the M+A Musical BI chairs.