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by Matthew Quinn
Now that it has completed the integration of Business Objects, SAP could be poised to strike more deals.
The German company's CEO Leo Apotheker said in an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro that SAP has 2.5 billion euros available and could raise a similar amount to use on acquisitions.
SAP broke from its tradition of avoiding large acquisitions when it spent nearly $7 billion to acquire business intelligence software maker Business Objects in 2007. SAP did not make any acquisitions last year after buying eight companies in 2007, according to data from Thomson Reuters.
But the post-deal integration of Business Objects has apparently gone smoothly enough to not scare SAP off from making other big deals.
"We have know-how since we achieved the incorporation of Business Objects," Apotheker said.
There was no mention of what types of businesses SAP might be interested in pursuing, but people around the CIOZone water coolers would like to see a deal for hosted software specialist NetSuite to help SAP in the small-to-medium-sized business market. Of course, it's not overly likely that Oracle boss Larry Ellison would go for such a deal, considering he helped co-found NetSuite in 1998 and remains the majority shareholder of the publicly traded company.
On the topic of Oracle and its deal for Sun Microsystems, Apotheker putdown Ellison's claim that making both software and hardware will create better systems.
"To the contrary, it becomes a conglomerate," he said. "And us, we want to be good in applications."
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