Waters Rankings Winners' Circle: SAP Acquisition Pays Dividends for Sybase

Anyone even remotely involved with data in financial services will, at some point, have come across Sybase. The firm’s acquisition by SAP in 2010, for $5.8 billion, hasn’t hurt its profile, although Sybase was a highly profitable organization before the Walldorf, Gemany-based behemoth made its acquisitive play.

Founded in 1984, Sybase now employs nearly 3600 employees, and is headquartered in Dublin, California. Within the industry, it is best known for its enterprise data management (EDM) and complex event processing (CEP) expertise, which has been reflected by Waters readers with the company’s awards this year.

“Our portfolio, which is now a combination of Sybase and SAP solutions, is essentially a complete set that includes vector and relational database technology; extract, transform and load (ETL); and transactional replication,” says Sinan Baskan, vice president of FSI at Sybase. “We offer both in-memory and disk-based solutions and can extend both data and analytics capabilities to mobile devices. We differentiate ourselves on the basis of scope and depth as well as platforming options.”

Sybase now has a presence in 24 industries. These include, but are not limited to, financial services, the telecommunications industry—the company is a major player in SMS and multimedia messaging—healthcare and the public sector. As such, it has been well-placed to observe the trends within various industries that are pushing toward greater information aggregation, coupled with governance and organization procedures, particularly with the advent of regulation and increasing prevalence of Big Data.

Baskan says, however, that regulatory reform is not the only factor that pushes firms toward enhancing EDM practices.

“Regulatory concerns may be the catalyst that accelerates the investment cycle but there are secular factors such as the consolidation of the industry that has been taking place over the past decade, and the requisite investment in integration, rationalization, and productivity improvements,” he says.

Heritage and Pedigree
Sybase’s two key products within the data management space are ASE and IQ. The first, a relational database management system (RDBMS) was created in 1984, in one of the founders’ homes, but quickly grew to become ubiquitous, particularly within financial services.

“ASE has been the flagship client-server RDBMS in distributed environments, especially in capital markets, for almost a quarter of a century and has been continually enhanced and is now available for the SAP user community for use with enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications,” Baskan explains. “IQ was the first columnar, SQL interface database, developed in the early 1990s, and has matured into the leading analytical database platform with a client base of over 2,000 institutions worldwide,” he says.

Given Sybase’s acquisition by SAP, in which it is now included as a standalone subsidiary under CEO John Chen, the combination of products and branding have created a full-service package for users within the space.

“Our future releases will be SAP-branded, and there are quite a few new product announcement coming up,” he says. “Next-generation offerings in financial services will be offered on the Hana platform, and that will be a truly game-changing innovation.”

Hana is SAP’s in-memory analytics and application platform, aimed at providing ultra-fast calculation speeds for processes that deal with modern phenomena such as Big Data. While Sybase declines to provide details around its future releases, the company’s efforts in EDM and CEP this year have pushed it to the forefront of the industry. “We appreciate this award and we thank the Waters community who voted in our favor. We believe that we will retain our leading position in this space for years to come,” says Baskan. “Stand by for significant news from us soon.”