Interview: Sybase and Avnet talk channel with CRN

CRN: What has been the response to SAP's acquisition of Sybase?

Dereck Daymont, managing director, Australia and New Zealand, Sybase: The analysts are saying it's a good thing. From our point of view SAP is a major player for our company and they have a lot of reach. It just puts Sybase firmly on the map as part of the whole mobility strategy.

In the next six months Sybase will be an integral offering from an SAP application point of view. Not that they will say to their customers you've got to take one database or the other, but it will be another offering.

CRN: What's been the partner reaction?

DD: Apart from, "How's your German" there hasn't been anything really bad.

Our partners, when they're out selling their applications on Sybase, keep getting asked: is Sybase going to be around [in the future]? Where are they going?

From the partner's point of view it adds a lot more validity to the Sybase argument and makes their job easier.

And SAP will put a lot of time and effort into the Sybase research and development.

Gavin Lawless, general manager, Avnet: If you look at over the last couple of years, with major vendors acquiring smaller vendors, we've seen a huge benefit to the organisation that's been acquired.

Quite often when you have vendors that are either growing or seeking to be more niche get questioned about their direction: What's the roadmap, what's the strategy? A lot of those questions go away because all of a sudden when you're getting acquired your story is totally legitimised. 

CRN: As we've seen recently it takes time for partner to know what they're doing.

GL: One of the important things is around what you're acquiring. With Nortel and Avaya it's an overlapping technology. There's a lot of overlap when organisations acquire complimentary technology, but it makes a big, big difference because all of a sudden it's an additive.

DD: Then you've got to look at how you get synergies out of the two organisations and how you cut back on duplication. In our case we're a very different business to SAP.

We're an infrastructure organisation and they're an applications vendor. We provide underlining database technology, underlying mobile middleware and software - something that they don't have.

We're talking about co-innovation strategies around mobilising their applications through our infrastructure technology, which is one of the reasons they said, if we're going to become a major player in mobile applications and move to the cloud, we need to have the capability to do that.

So [Sybase] will be a standalone business and run independently. Our organisation is very, very profitable so there's no reason for SAP to come in and make wholesale cuts to make it more profitable, that is not their intention.

They will look at how they integrate the Sybase technologies into their offerings, that's a given.

CRN: Is Avnet now an SAP partner as an extension of the Sybase partnership?

GL: There's no question: We will not automatically become an SAP partner. Over time, while the two organisations will run separately they obviously want to get as much complimentary sales opportunity as they can. Does that mean there's a space for us in that go to market?Hopefully, [but] certainly not automatically.

At the moment, from both Avnet the Sybase point of view nothing changes from today. We are focused on Sybase, we're focused on doing the job, we've been speaking about it for a long time and that's it.

CRN: Moving on from the SAP-Sybase deal. What led to the Sybase deal with Avent?

DD: We're a small company that's run pretty lean, we didn't really have the bandwidth to build the channel the way we'd like to in the growth areas of our business, which are business intelligence and mobility, than it is in the underlining database.

The intention was, let's go and find somebody that really knows the channel better than we do. Let's find somebody that's got a lot more feet on the street than we do and somebody who can add a lot of value to our channel by having a lot of resources, both from a business development point of view and product management and engineering point of view.

It just really gives us a lot more reach into the marketplace and we need to find new partners in the growth areas of our business and we need to make sure we're supporting and growing partners in those areas in which we've traditionally been strong. So we see it as a way for us to grow our business significantly and increase market share.

In Australia we've been in discussion for nine months. It's not a unique relationship; Avnet is the disite in India and is looking to expand in the region and else where in the world.

We are not allowed to start going out and jointly working with SAP at this stage.