How Accurate Was SAP on Mobility Due to Sybase Acquisition?

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has said that they were number one in mobility due to the Sybase acquisition.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

Video Introduction: What SAP Said About Being Number One in Mobility Due to Sybase Acquisition

Text Introduction (Skip if You Watched the Video)

SAP talked up its mobility offering for some years. In 2010 Bill McDermott made the following statement to CIO (an IDG property) regarding criticism on the price paid for Sybase, which came with mobility assets quote – Exceptional assets don’t come cheap,” McDermott said. “This gives us the number-one position in mobility. As does [co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe], the new desktop is the mobile device. … This is a dynamite transaction for both sides (McDermott speaking of the Sybase acquisition), and we’re very, very confident it will play out that way in the marketplace. – unquote. You will learn the accuracy of SAP in their claims of SAP mobility.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

What Actually Happened with SAP Mobility?

SAP Mobility, even with Sybase’s mobility, offering never amounted to anything. There would be questions if Sybase tricked SAP by exaggerating what it had in mobility to be larger than what it was (Sybase SAPed SAP) SAP’s offering with or without was unimpressive. They could not compete with companies that could hire iOS or Android developers. iOS and Android development are simply at a completely different price level than SAP consultants.

Today, SAP still maintains a mobility portion of their website, but there has been very little going on with SAP Mobility for some time.

Although SAP attempts to present it as a universal UI that can render identically well on any device, Fiori is primarily a mobile user interface.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating on SAP being number one in mobility due to Sybase acquisition.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.