Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

SAP Vaults Into Top Three E-Commerce Players With Hybris Buy

German software giant SAP said it will acquire Hybris, a privately held e-commerce software company based in Switzerland.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but educated guesses put the value of the deal at between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion. Hybris is known primarily for competing with IBM’s WebSphere Commerce Suite and Oracle’s Commerce Suite. And it’s also worth noting that the deal is taking place a week after Netsuite, the cloud business software player, said it was getting into the “commerce as a service” business and announced a big customer win with Williams Sonoma.

Analyst Karl Keirstead of BMO Capital Markets, in a note sent to clients earlier today, said he was positive on the acquisition. “Demand for new commerce platforms appears to be robust and the space is attracting new entrants,” he wrote. SAP, he said, had previously struggled to get any traction in e-commerce, and the acquisition essentially puts it among the top three players, along with Oracle and IBM. Also, most of Hybris’ clients are in Europe.

Keirstead raised his revenue estimate for SAP to 17.5 billion euros (about $23 billion) for 2013 and left his EPS estimate at 3.48 euros, or $4.56 a share.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald