Mike Madura pops the 64000 dollar question on Linkedin: "With this deal, I am interested in your thoughts regarding… 1) effect upon SAP? 2) predictions for Cognos, Business Objects, others??? 3) long-term implications for the SW industry? ". Here are some of the responses he got:

Effect on SAP:
Brian Galicia says "Only in additional revenue that Oracle can recognize. SAP has a internal BI solution (BW) and they just acquired a much smaller company in Pilot. Based on SAP's stance, they will do tuck in acquistions rather than large purchases like Oracle has done. SAP doesn't just focus on BI but on the entire business application suite". Andy Bynum seems to agree with him "I don't think SAP will do much to recognize this event. In my opinion, they really see this as a race with only one participant, themselves! They make a lot of noise about the competion but I just don't get the sense they really care. They continue to march forward and do what they feel is best." Doug Lautzenheiser however feels this might lead to a tug of war between Oracle and SAP "SAP and Hyperion are definitely linked. SAP manufacturing customers, for example, may like SAP for those operational functions, but use Hyperion for financial consolidation and reporting. With Oracle owning Hyperion, SAP may now want to "persuade" those clients to eliminate Hyperion in fear of Oracle whispering the same message to have them replace SAP as the manufacturing application. The ETL vendors may get caught in this as well, as they provide tools to dump SAP data into Hyperion (e.g., Informatica, which announced a partnership with Hyperion mid-2006). Of course, SAP has been a partner of Oracle for some time as they do not have their own database engine. So, would IBM and SAP be good complements? On the BI side, I think SAP will still want an end-user tool, so Business Objects/Crystal is a good candidate (Crystal Reports being a common tool used by SAP shops)." 

I am not an Enterprise Software guy but what do you think ?