So Sybase ASE is here. It is here to stay. With the 6 billion dollar investment in the acquisistion, we all know that SAP is committed to this platform. It should give them the control over the DB that has been the one major area of thier applications that they have been missing. SAP is now in a position to tailor the database to the needs of its ERP applictions rather than the other way around as it has always been.
SAP is finally starting to ramp up its Sales and Marketing around Sybase ASE and you may start hearing about the possibilty of migrating.
Like many of you, Sybase had been off my radar as a DB platform to consider until the new of the acquisistion by SAP. And probably like many of you, I was quite surprised to learn about the platform once it came back in the spotlight. The fact that it is very strong in the healthcare and financial sectors shows that it is not the less-than-enterprise-level software that it might have seemed. It has proven to be quite the robust and technically sofisticated product that is a requirement of a high-volume ERP backend DB.
To perform a new SAP implementation on Sybase ASE should be a straightforward undertaking (in terms of the technical side of the implementation). SAP has even gone so far as to encapsulate the DB installation into the SAPINST. No longer is DB installation something done prior to, or in the middle of, the SAP installation. It is all one process.
It gets a bit more tricky when you decide to migrate over to Sybase. This is not to say there are complications from the DB platform, but from the SAP applications that are supported on Sybase. See Note 1554717 for details on the supported versions. In many cases you will need to perform Upgrades or Enhancement Packs prior to migrating and Unicode conversion during the migration if you are not currently Unicode.
I think Sybase will be a good thing for SAP. If SAP can make this work and give their customers a tempting value proposition in migrating, it should be a major part in thier arsenal in the ERP war, especially with Oracle.
