SAP's Acquisition Checklist: Application, Business Analytics, and cloud computing

"In the Chinese market, SAP hit record levels last year, gaining the highest ever growth in performance." "April 23, SAP Chinese people told reporters.

In the vision of many Chinese enterprises, SAP is an ERP software enterprise, which is similar to its business in China, including Ufida (600588. SH), Kingdee (0268.:HK), speed Tatsu and so on. But with the launch of a series of mergers and acquisitions, SAP's business layout has already surpassed ERP.

In contrast to China's performance, the German software giant is wildly expanding, including a huge merger in global markets and a $2 billion trillion in Chinese investment.

"The purpose of SAP acquisition is not to take market share." "April 17, SAP Global senior vice president, China president Xiao in Shenzhen, said in an interview with reporters, around the" best business package in the world, "the goal, SAP is mainly in five markets to find acquisition targets.

Xiao said that SAP's five target acquisition markets were: application, Business Analytics, mobile, cloud computing, and databases.

Specific acquisitions include: In February this year, SAP announced that it had spent 3.4 billion of dollars to complete the acquisition of cloud computing Enterprise SuccessFactors, in order to be in the database layout, SAP in September 2010 with 5.8 billion U.S. dollars to bring Sybase, the latter's main product is the database software, Including data analysis procedures for financial institutions, the main competition is Oracle and IBM.

In addition to these huge mergers and acquisitions, SAP also acquired a range of small companies, most recently on April 11 this year. In an effort to drive innovation in Mobile solutions, SAP said on the day it decided to buy a leading corporate mobile application and technology business Syclo.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the world's largest network service input device, according to Gartner Research. Data mobility brings about a sudden surge in data volumes and a large demand for data mining and analysis, the era of large data. Related to this is also the cloud computing, the future of a large number of applications may be transferred to the cloud to complete. It is clear that the direction of SAP acquisition is closely related to the trend of global IT industry development.

"These acquisitions have extended our product lines, such as the acquisition of Sybase, we are a veritable database software provider." "Xiao said.

But Xiao stressed that the SAP purchase list does not include hardware, "We are not interested in hardware, there are many professional hardware companies in the market, can complement our software."

This seemingly casual words, it is easy to associate Oracle. The company's business since its inception in 1977 has been software sales, but in April 2009 it announced a $7.4 billion purchase of server maker Sun, a rare foray into the hardware sector. The SAP acquisition of Sybase also has a direct competitive relationship with Oracle, which is longer than the database.

"The first action after SAP acquisition is the integration of technology, by learning the strengths of the merged companies, incorporating each other's technology and forming an integrated advantage." Xiao said that "the merger with the sales team is the last job of the order" compared to the sales department in charge.

The integration and synergy of SAP's takeover have yet to be seen, but the company's latest earnings have had a positive effect. SAP achieved total revenue of € 3.35 billion as of March 31, 2012, up 11% from 3.02 billion euros a year earlier, according to the first-quarter results released April 13 this year; Based on IFRS, SAP operating profit was € 630 million, up 6% from a year earlier of 600 million euros.

As for the Chinese market, SAP decided to invest as much as $2 billion trillion by 2015. Xiao to reporters that these funds are mainly invested in four areas: first, localized products and applications; second, promote the delivery of products and services, such as the construction of global after-sales service center; third, the sales channel construction, from the previous coastal layout extended to China's inland areas; four, enhance the partner, The project implementation side as well as two times technology development side ecosystem construction. For example, previously in the channel to take the total surrogate core Agent mode, the future will further develop the second and third-tier distributors.

Xiao said that sap in the Chinese market in the past has been acclimatized, mainly because it is not suitable for localization of China's national conditions, and her previous two years of work is mainly, "The SAP has not released a lot of good things, released."

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)