SAP can purchase Red Hat

This week the market was again filled with rumors of rather possible merger of Red Hat, this time as the potential buyer the western media call SAP company. At the same time industry analysts doubt the probability of development of such scenario.

"SAP has a number of other strategic directions" as, for example, implementation of mobile technologies at the level of the enterprises, the analyst of 451 Group Chayna of Dr. Martens (China Martens) in the context of recent purchase of Sybase reminded.

Besides, top managers of SAP repeatedly said that the company aims at creation at the clients of heterogeneous IT infrastructure. Purchase of Red Hat having in the portfolio solutions for virtualization, middleware and technology based on Linux do not correlate with this approach, the expert reminded.

The analyst of RedmonkMichael Cote expressed similar opinion: "SAP does not buy infrastructure suppliers, and Sybase direct to that confirmation", - he noted.

Nevertheless, in IT market now "crazy time" when each vendor becoming exhausted expands the technology base, added Kote. Here he reminded of strategic promotion of VMware on the market of application development at the expense of SpringSource and a release of Oracle to the hardware market by means of purchase of SUN Microsystems.

At the same time Kote stated also one more, most resolute reason according to which the transaction of Red Hat-SAP will hardly take place. "Until recently SAP was extremely not friendly to open-source. And from all companies which she could purchase Red Hat represents just a quintessence of the idea of the open source software", - the expert told.

Moreover, though in SAP there are strong evangelists of open-source, "they are at the helm not this big ship", - the independent analyst Jon Reed noticed. Whatever it happened, SAP and Red Hat will continue to strengthen the strategic partnership, the analyst of Altimeter GroupRay Wang told.

Purchase of Red Hat could cause the mixed feelings rather future some technologies, such as, for example, SAP NetWeaver platform, declared Vang. At the last meeting devoted to purchase of Sybase, CTO SAP Vishal Sikka as could tried to emphasize invariable commitment of SAP NetWeaver.

The transaction would create a problem of "imposing" of solution portfolios two the company at each other, in particular it would concern solutions, important for SAP middleware, Read considers.

Besides, it is necessary to take that aspect into consideration that purchase of Red Hat which profit for reporting 2010 was $748 million would require a considerable amount of money. However, SAP already showed the readiness for large deals more than once, having paid $6.8 billion for BI vendor of Business Objects and about $6 billion for Sybase. "But these transactions were made on for the sake of compilation of lines, and for the sake of investment into perspective trends", Read added.

If SAP also continues a series of large acquisitions, then, most likely, as the potential purpose it will consider SaaS provider, considers Kote. Now in SaaS line of SAP there are already Business ByDesign on-demand ERP and also the SaaS expansions for on-premises DBMS of the company, but completely this strategy is in embryo so far.

At present SAP is much more anxious with accomplishment of those obligations which the company undertook in connection with Sybase purchase, in particular, having promised to create own mobile platform in the next nine months, Read believes. "They need to make it", - he summarized.

Representatives of Red Hat and SAP refused to comment on a situation, PC World reports.