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SAP buys Californian Sybase for €4.6bn

German business software titan SAP announced late on Wednesday that it has agreed to buy California-based Sybase for $5.8 billion (€4.6 billion).

Published: 13 May 2010 10:07 CEST

SAP buys Californian Sybase for €4.6bn

Photo: DPA

SAP said that its US subsidiary, SAP America, will make an all-cash offer for all of the outstanding shares of Sybase at $65 per share, a premium of nearly 16 percent over Sybase’s closing price on Wednesday.

Sybase shares surged more than 35 percent during the day’s trading on rumours of an acquisition of the Dublin, California-based company.

SAP said it will fund the purchase, which has been approved by the Sybase board of directors, with cash on hand and a €2.75 billion loan facility from Barclays Capital and Deutsche Bank.

The acquisition is SAP’s largest since it purchased Business Object of France in 2007 for €4.8 billion and will better place the company to compete with US business software Oracle, particularly on mobile devices.

“SAP will accelerate the reach of its solutions across mobile platforms,” SAP said in a statement. “Sybase’s innovative mobile platform can connect all applications and data and enable them on mobile devices.”

“Mobile devices are becoming the preferred interaction point with business applications, whether the user is a factory supervisor, a retail manager or an entrepreneur in a developing nation,” SAP co-chief executive Jim Hagemann Snabe said.

Sybase chief executive John Chen said that “by combining the market leader in enterprise applications with the market leader in enterprise mobility, companies around the world will be able to run their business from many devices.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of the year.

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Cookie fight: Austrian activist in tough online privacy fight

The 35-year-old Austrian lawyer and his Vienna-based privacy campaign group NOYB (None Of Your Business) is currently handling no fewer than 800 complaints in various jurisdictions on behalf of internet users.

“For an average citizen, it’s almost impossible right now to enforce your rights”, Schrems told AFP. “For us as an organisation, it’s already a lot of work to do that” given the system’s complexity due to the regulators’ varying requirements, he added.

The 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict rules on how companies can use and store personal data, with the threat of huge fines for firms breaching them.

While hundreds of millions of euros in fines have been imposed following complaints filed by NOYB, Schrems said the GDPR is hardly ever enforced. And that’s a “big problem”, he added.

He said the disregard for fundamental rights such as data privacy is almost comparable to “a dictatorship”. “The difference between reality and the law is just momentous,” Schrems
added.

‘Annoying’ cookies

Instead of tackling the problems raised by the GDPR, companies resort to “window dressing” while framing the rules as an “annoying law” full of “crazy cookie banners”, according to Schrems.

Under the regulation, companies have been obliged to seek user consent to install “cookies” enabling browsers to save information about a user’s online habits to serve up highly targeted ads.

Industry data suggests only three percent of internet users actually approve of cookies, but more than 90 percent are pressured to consent due to a “deceptive design” which mostly features “accept” buttons.

Stymied by the absence of a simple “yes or no” option and overwhelmed by a deluge of pop-ups, users get so fed up that they simply give up, Schrems said. Contrary to the law’s intent, the burden is being “shifted to the individual consumer, who should figure it out”.

Even though society now realises the importance of the right to have private information be forgotten or removed from the internet, real control over personal data is still far-off, the activist said. But NOYB has been helping those who want to take back control by launching
privacy rights campaigns that led companies to adopt “reject” buttons.

Shift of business model

Regulators have imposed big penalties on companies that violated GDPR rules: Facebook owner Meta, whose European headquarters are in Dublin, was hit with fines totalling 390 million euros ($424 million) in January.

One reason why tech giants like Google or Meta as well as smaller companies choose against playing by the GDPR rules is because circumventing them pays off, Schrems said.

Thriving on the use of private data, tech behemoths make “10 to 20 times more money by violating the law, even if they get slapped with the maximum fine”, he added.

Contacted by AFP, both companies said they were working hard to make sure their practices complied with the regulations.

Schrems also accuses national regulators of either being indifferent or lacking the resources to seriously investigate complaints. “It’s a race to the bottom,” Schrems said. “Each country has its own way of not getting anything done”.

Buoyed by his past legal victories, Schrems looks to what he calls the “bold” EU Court of Justice to bring about change as it “usually is a beacon of hope in all of this”.

Meanwhile, the European Commission is considering a procedures regulation to underpin and clarify the GDPR.

In the long-run, however, the situation will only improve once large companies “fundamentally shift their business models”. But that would require companies to stop being “as crazy profitable as they are right now,” Schrems said.

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