"Never comment about those things you know nothing about," is the recommendation - so I won't remark on SAP nor, particularly, about Business Objects, though I have had dealings with both at various times. Aside from questions about what BO means to SAP (maybe I should rephrase that), interesting to me was what this means for the wider market.

As I have written previously, information management and, for that matter, service management are like different tracks up the same mountain, with fissures in between caused largely by historical scenarios - even the separation between structured and unstructured data comes largely from the adoption of two types of (incompatible) data repository. The result is that we have, today, a number of larger companies that offer large-scale, solution type software, and meanwhile smaller vendor companies whose job it is to add functionality or enable integration between the bigger stuff.

There’s a whole stack of acquisitions we’re seeing right now, which are potentially partially to do with the liquidity of the market (i.e. companies have cash to spend) but equally, there’s a consolidation phenomenon taking place. The big players - IBM, Oracle, EMC and now SAP are all filling gaps in their own portfolios - like blotters, absorbing the smaller players as they go. This is healthy, particularly for larger companies that want to rely more closely on a smaller set of vendors; but also for the vendors themselves, who can look to deliver more integrated solution sets and service packages to go with them.

P.S. Still waiting for the HP acquisition of Opentext/Ixos! No I don’t have any insider knowledge, but to me it would be like a key fitting in a lock.