SAP into Teradata acquisition?

It is been a while a rumor is spreading over web regarding SAP is willing into Teradata acquisition. SAP would strengthen it data warehousing products portfolio where have a big share others pure data warehousing companies like SAS. Over last year’s acquisition war with IBM, when SAP got Business Objects and IBM got Cognos it seems that that it strikes back. Teradata is currently very proud to be independed as its spin off from NCR Corp in October 2007. Of course they would to stay as they are – independed. On other hand SAP has recently announced big freeze that would possibly mean share holder of SAP do not want to spend any additional money in today’s financials crisis but they can be on opposite side as the current markets very low rates and it might worth to invest in acquisition.

Teradata is well known for its massively parallel processing system. It has its own database system (DBMS). It is very fast and very suitable for very large size of databases. Formerly they had a hardware portfolio of products as well. Still they offering they brand of disk arrays. They invited so called AMP Access Module Processor – a common discrete chunks distributed evenly among the database in order to read it very fast. Before AMP was hardware; now it is a software component.

Let see what future will bring and how data warehousing companies compete between each other, how ORACLE, SAP, IBM, TERADATA, SAS, SYBASE etc.

-         update on 16/05/2009 –

It is been one and half a year since I wrote this post and things are getting closer. Recently (around end of April) SAP and Teradata announced agreement to provide SAP NetWeaver BW+ on the Teradata environment (database). In terms of this integration SAP BI portfolio including BW and BusinessObjects software will be co operable with Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse solutions. SAP BW will be running natively on Teradata database platform. By this agreement we can assume that SAP’s intent to acquire Teradata is over or it is just another step to get into it.

See here on what else SAP is cooperating with Teradata.

-      update on 13/09/2022 – 

After more than decade it turned out that, there wasn’t any acquisition at all. Instead, quite a battle took place. In 2018 Teradata accused SAP of trade secret misappropriation, copyright infringement and antitrust violations. Plaintiff claimed that since 2009 the two companies were working together on a joint venture (called Bridge Project) that had an aim to combine SAP’s ERP capabilities and data warehousing capabilities of Teradata. Soon after SAP introduced HANA database in 2011 it cut its ties to Teradata.  By that, they suggested that SAP might have used trade secrets to develop its own database.

Later in 2018, US court ordered Teradata to be more specific how SAP misappropriated trade secret. SAP argued to dismiss the case having said that if Teradata was really concerned, they should have investigated as soon as HANA was launched not just eight years after. However, the court rejected SAP's motion.

In 2021 the US court found that one of SAP's patents (from 2004) is not sufficiently innovative to a merit the legal protection of a patent. There was also the founding that Teradata's technical trade secret claims fail because it failed to protect the confidentiality of its information. So no clear winner at this time.