by Angela Guess
Dana Gardner of ZDNet recently reported that SAP is expanding into the database market in an uncharacteristic turn. Gardner writes, “In its rise to leadership of the ERP market, SAP shrewdly placed bounds around its strategy: it would stick to its knitting on applications and rely on partnerships with systems integrators to get critical mass implementation across the Global 2000. When it came to architecture, SAP left no doubt of its ambitions to own the application tier, while leaving the data tier to the kindness of strangers (or in Oracle’s case, the estranged).”
He continues, “Times change in more ways than one – and one of those ways is in the data tier. The headlines of SAP acquiring Sybase (for its mobile assets, primarily) and subsequent emergence of HANA, its new in-memory data platform, placed SAP in the database market. And so it was that at an analyst meeting last December, SAP made the audacious declaration that it wanted to become the #2 database player by 2015.”
photo credit: SAP
