4 ms·

I searched online - seems that when SAP bought Sybase, net revenues of Sybase were around $1b - this was only one product in their portfolio. Is it true that t

I searched online - seems that when SAP bought Sybase, net revenues of Sybase were around $1b - this was only one product in their portfolio. Is it true that the product was making $1b / year?

dharmab 6y ago
I read it as it could have been making $1b at some point after the SAP acquisition.
- eloff 6y ago
  She mentioned it really took off after the SAP acquisition. So it's possible.
  - bigbizisverywyz 6y ago
    Sybase was really dying on the vine probably at that point, so SAP buying them gave the product a better chance of actually being developed and not abandoned, so that probably helped a lot to boost sales and support contracts. I remember where I work, the product went from 'divest' to 'retain' following the acquisition.
jcampbell1 6y ago
It looks like the product was conceived in 1992, Watcom was first acquired in 1994 by Powersoft, which was bought by Sybase in 1995. SAP bought Sybase in 2010. I'd bet the product has seen significant growth in the mobile / IoT era. Applications that work offline and synchronizes later are a pain to build. Seems like the kind of infrastructure that exists in every police car these days.
- teleforce 6y ago
  Despite the promise of Starlink of pervasive internet connection, there are always blind spots where connection just do not exist or just pain intermittent. Personally I think the future of desktop applications should be designed around the premise of localhost first and cloud second. The ability of the locally host application to synchronize to the cloud or central repository (similar to rsync and Git) should be the default not the other way around (I am looking at you Microsoft Teams). Technically there should be no different between people working independently with their local copy of data to be merged centrally later, and an offline application with an intermittent internet connection. Now with readily available VPN tools like Wireguard becoming more popular the notion of using web applications for distributed authoring and collaboration, etc, is not necessary anymore. But if you insist to use web based technology there is always protocol like webdav to the rescue. If you do not want either of them (VPN and webdav), the recently announced SMB over QUIC can be a very good alternative solution [1]. [1]https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-over-quic-to-windows.aspx https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-ove...

I searched online - seems that when SAP bought Sybase, net revenues of Sybase were around $1b - this was only one product in their portfolio. Is it true that the product was making $1b / year?

dharmab 6y ago

I read it as it could have been making $1b at some point after the SAP acquisition.

eloff 6y ago
She mentioned it really took off after the SAP acquisition. So it's possible.
- bigbizisverywyz 6y ago
  Sybase was really dying on the vine probably at that point, so SAP buying them gave the product a better chance of actually being developed and not abandoned, so that probably helped a lot to boost sales and support contracts. I remember where I work, the product went from 'divest' to 'retain' following the acquisition.

jcampbell1 6y ago

It looks like the product was conceived in 1992, Watcom was first acquired in 1994 by Powersoft, which was bought by Sybase in 1995. SAP bought Sybase in 2010. I'd bet the product has seen significant growth in the mobile / IoT era. Applications that work offline and synchronizes later are a pain to build. Seems like the kind of infrastructure that exists in every police car these days.

teleforce 6y ago
Despite the promise of Starlink of pervasive internet connection, there are always blind spots where connection just do not exist or just pain intermittent. Personally I think the future of desktop applications should be designed around the premise of localhost first and cloud second. The ability of the locally host application to synchronize to the cloud or central repository (similar to rsync and Git) should be the default not the other way around (I am looking at you Microsoft Teams). Technically there should be no different between people working independently with their local copy of data to be merged centrally later, and an offline application with an intermittent internet connection. Now with readily available VPN tools like Wireguard becoming more popular the notion of using web applications for distributed authoring and collaboration, etc, is not necessary anymore. But if you insist to use web based technology there is always protocol like webdav to the rescue. If you do not want either of them (VPN and webdav), the recently announced SMB over QUIC can be a very good alternative solution [1]. [1]https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-over-quic-to-windows.aspx https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-ove...