Silly Season in the Business Applications Market
One of my "hobbies" is to track our competitive marketplace. It seems that May has seen more change and consolidation in the market with merger and acquisition and announcements of quarterly results.
Here's my summary of the month that was;
- JBA acquires Maugistics for $211m in cash. Expected sale, unexpected buyer.
- Oracle spending spree continues with the acquisition of Portal Software a telecoms and billing software vendor
- 11 months after their announced merger Lawson and Intentia finally begin to work as a single company
- SAP and Microsoft joint developed office plug-in code named Mendocino has been officially released as Duet
- Extensity (ex GEAC) bids for Systems Union in £236m cash deal.
- During their Q1 earnings call SAP CEO Henning Kagerman claimed SAP’s mid-market share to be 36%, followed by Oracle with 24% and Microsoft with 17%. The next debate is the definition of mid-market. You say potato, I say potato, let's call the whole thing a statistical fudge.
- Sage posted first half figures of ₤455m showing 18% growth, although only 5% organic growth. The acquisition trail will continue under the strategy of locally developed software.
- Oracle promises lifetime support to it's customers with a promise to indefinitely enhance all current solutions (JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel) with a free upgrade to the Fusion single code-base provided the customer is running a specified release version of the product. If a customer is not running the current release they will have to perform a technical upgrade to take advantage of lifetime support
- In a response to Duet IBM have integrated SAP with Notes. Wonder if they'll offer the same for Dynamics?
- Infor (formerly Agilisys) to purchase SSA Global for $1.4bn in cash. In the past 3 years Infor have been through 20 transactions, while SSA Global have been through 12. With a combined revenue of $1.65bn the group now occupy a top 3 place in the enterprise applications market.
- SAP chairman and co-founder comments that the company is open to offers of acquisition, although he believes there are only 3 companies capable of the transaction, IBM, Microsoft and Google. SAP will not entertain discussions with Oracle, IBM is currently rumoured to be interested.
- SAP are working with Kleiner Perkins Caufied & Byers to establish a $125m VC fund for investment in innovations around the Netweaver stack
Let me know what you think.
