CareerCafeIts taken some time for the European regulators to get their collective heads around SAP’s acquisition of Sybase. Sybase was invented in 1984 and was primarily designed as a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) for early adopters of the client/server architecture. Sybase acquired Powersoft in 1994, and through that PowerBuilder, a development tool quite popular with the Perth geek community. When Sybase launched its mobility subsidiary, Sybase iAnywhere, in 2000, SQL Anywhere became its flagship relational database management system (RDBMS) and helped the company to become the leader of the mobile database market.
This tweaked SAP’s interest, but it cost them US$6 billion to take them over. “Mobility is the new desktop,” according to SAP’s Co-CEO Bill McDermott, and SAP’s SQL anywhere has them all very excited at the SAP mother ship.
