As a Vote of Non-Confidence to Its Own BI Strategy, SAP just acquired Roambi

In a not particularly surprising move, SAP’s knee-jerk reaction to its a dramatic fall in Gartner BI Rankings has resulted in a yet another acquisition.

I was wondering about this scenario in my previous post about Tableau’s stock taking a dive, where I pondered whether SAP had enough cash to acquire the company. It seems like the answer is no, as they had to settle on acquiring Roambi, a company that did not even make the list of top BI vendors (please see the Gartner image above).

So what does this mean for the parties involved? The clear winner is obviously Roambi – the financial details of the deal have not been released, but if the Tableau’s stock dynamics is any indication, getting acquired was obviously a timely thing to do.

SAP has the best-in-business sales force that is probably rejoicing right now as they have something new to upsell to the customers.

I feel really sorry for the existing SAP customers who will have to suffer through yet another wave of BI sales cycles from their friendly SAP sales reps.

I am doubtful whether SAP has enough cash to invest in Roambi, Lumira & Business Objects to properly integrate them into a coherent BI offering and, therefore, I believe that this acquisition will not materially affect SAP’s ranking in the Gartner’s BI report.