Stories about: Business Objects

SAP and Sybase officials gathered in Boston on Thursday to reveal how they plan to bring together their respective technologies in the areas of mobility, analytics and enterprise information management.

Now that SAP's roughly $US6 billion acquisition of Sybase has gained clearance from European regulators, it may not be long before the deal is finalised. With that in mind, users and partners of the companies have much to consider during the next few months, analysts say.

Amazon and IBM are the "cloud champions" according to a new report, but Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Red Hat and VMware are also among the list of heavyweights in the emerging cloud computing field.

Oracle is preparing to launch a major migration of portals that serve customers and technologies gained through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

SAP Executives have said little about their plans for Sybase products once the enterprise software vendor's $5.8 billion deal to buy the Dublin, Calif., database maker closes, leaving Sybase users and partners wondering about the fate of technology that many of them depend on.

SAP's co-CEOs pushed two central messages during a keynote address Tuesday at the Sapphire conference running simultaneously in Frankfurt and Orlando: They are working hard to earn customers' trust and to build out a technology strategy encompassing on-premises, on-demand and mobile applications.

Sybase users and partners are wondering how the company's technologies will fare under the pending ownership of SAP, but some of the answers are easier to come by than others.

SAP's planned acquisition of Sybase reads like a World War I battle plan: replete with confident, assured references to "synergy" and objectives and market opportunities. But now, as then, the plan may bear little resemblance to what's happening on the ground.

The high-profile shakeup at SAP's top executive levels continued Thursday with the announcement that executive board member John Schwarz, viewed by some observers as a potential future CEO at the company, has resigned.

Next month, IBM will release a beta version of a software application designed to keep track of how information flows across different systems, sending alerts when source data has been altered or isn't properly ingested into some target system or report.