Biz Dev in NYC by Rob Tsai

From Seeking Alpha, Sramana Mitra discusses SAP’s $6.8 billion acquisition of Business Objects at a 20% premium:

Business Intelligence is clearly a market in which SAP needs to be present, and market alignment wise, this is a phenomenally good strategic move. The largest previous deal was in May when Oracle agreed to buy Hyperion for $3.3 billion.

Other BI players in the market include, most notably, Canadian company Cognos, whose On-Demand / Software-As-A-Service (my definition, Enterprise 3.0) strategy is less concrete. Business Objects is definitely a better acquisition target.

Bottomline, SAP had to start learning the game of big acquisitions. This is a very good start. My guess is, coming up next is a Content Management acquisition, another gaping hole in their portfolio. The likely target is OpenText (Nasdaq: OTEX), a $1.4 Billion Canadian company, in 2008.

So was the acquisition for the traditional Enterprise Software business?  Or the nascent Software As A Service business?  Both?

It’s timely that Rapt (where I work as a software sales consultant) recently launched Rapt On Demand -  the  Software As A Service version of our inventory forecasting, planning and reporting application.

Though an earlier McKinsey study (as covered by Nick Carr) cited that the most popular SaaS business applications are for human-resource management, billing and order entry, and sales management, it’s clear that other analytics applications are also migrating to the SaaS delievery model (see David Hatch).