60 hours to the start of Sapphire. With all the SAP/Sybase Acquisition news you’re obviously in for a treat. Ladies and Gentlemen, come closer and have a good look at a larder full of SAP news. You won’t be disappointed ! For your convenience, I’ve split the news into “SAP/Sybase” and “Other”.

SAP/Sybase

• SAP News Room: SAP to acquire Sybase, Inc.
• Heise.de sees SAP pushing onto Oracle’s patch (english translation here)
• Deal Architect’s (Vinnie Mirchandani) first and later reaction. On the whole, he says that SAP probably had already enough on its plate, but senses a lot of buzz (similar to the Business Objects acquisition). He’ll encounter SAP’s statement of “Sybase is about customer choice” with a question about incorporation Zoho, Netsuite and Rimini at next week’s Sapphire press conference. Let’s see what they’re going to say.
• Several blogs chimed in with what I see as the most important outcome from all this: clarity. I remember walking around the stalls at the last TechEd and speaking to the Skys and Sybases etc of this world. It was like a game of Mikado – everyone tried to stay in the game without making a hash of it and clinging on to what they’ve got. The Sybase acquisition “reduces options” in a good way (Forrester’s Stefan Ried). The blogs I found which emphasised this were: William Newman’s “View from the C-Level”, and John Appleby’s blog on SDN (another new SAP Mentor!).
• CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum thinks “SAP stays classy” and I do agree with him. Whilst others like Bob Warfield seem to think that SAP just wanted to make a big splash (“This deal is a classic example of a wounded elephant crashing through the jungle”…), I think it is clear that Sybase was a clearly thought through, carefully executed move.
• analysts and pundits seemed to be quieter on the In-Memory-Ambitions that SAP links to the acquisition. Dennis Howlett gives his view (amongst other things) here, remaining slightly unconvinced, citing an example of a recent Deutsche Bank announcement.

Other

• A good article by Panorama Consulting’s Lena Laakso on Overcoming ERP Project Fatigue.
• rather strange post in InformationWeek talking about the “SAP Recession”. I guess we all agree that BI has had an effect (or maybe IT in general?), what about electronics or mathematics? Fine. Let’s all agree it’s been a “human kind induced recession” then.
• Ann Rosenberg, SAP, announces the new .
• SAP’s latest Sustainability Report went live.
• Craig Cmehil with a little more detail on Innojagd, SAP’s new innovation initiative
• Jon Reed with a great podcast on “SAP Soft Skills – Myth vs Reality”. Accompanied by the magnificent Guy Couillard.

and here’s the Twitterverse for you

• Vendorprisey: Early call on SAP licensing challenges. SAP product naming is confusing and frustrating.
• chriskanaracus: Business ByDesign interface is more colorful than before, but still won’t be mistaken for a Wii game or anything
• steverumsby: Stupid Java stack. Whoever in SAP thought this was a good idea? Please can everyone go back to coding in ABAP?
• z_basis_adm: @steverumsby SAP on Java makes me laugh. Tons of useless logs. Really poor memory management. Apps that just die without gening errors. Fun! (in response to @steverumsby)