I assume you’ve heard everything about the SAP and Business Objects Acquisition. After all, there are 182,000 search results in Google for this query alone… If you followed the news you also know that John Schwarz, Business Objects CEO, will join SAP’s executive board as its seventh member (SAP is a German company and the executive board acts as the company’s management team) and will get to manage both the former BO business and SAP’s fast-growing Business User division, that is led by Doug Merritt, SAP Labs top brass. Lots of power and influence from day one.

Major acquisitions like this one seldom have only one motive, and they are much more a form of art than science. One can assume that SAP liked the technology and products, was intrigued by the large installed base and the synergies with SAP’s Business User strategy. There are also many other hidden motives— I would like to speculate* about one of them—the succession motive. Read the rest of this entry »