You can find articles about this all over the Internet, so I won't bother linking directly to any particular one. Here's a search link from Google that will help you get started.
SAP is going to be paying $65 / share for Sybase. They'll pay some of it out of cash, and they are financing the rest. Kind of like buying a house.
SAP says they like Sybase because of their "mobile presence" and their in-memory database technology. Sybase IQ has offered in-memory column-oriented database architecture for years, and SAP makes use of the same concepts with their accelerated version of Explorer. So I can see where that part is coming from. I will admit that I am not completely up to speed on the mobile offerings from Sybase. In fact, I wasn't even aware they had any. So I guess I have some research to do.
I have to imagine that one of the biggest "woots!" going on at SAP headquarters is coming from the folks that no longer have to sell Oracle database packages along with the SAP ERP. It's probably hard to put a value on that.
The market has initially had a negative reaction to the news with SAP stock trading down in after-hours trading. Sybase is, of course, way up. Oracle is also down as this impacts them in a couple of ways.
I'm only skimming the surface of this, as I only found out a bit ago. My final thought: what does this do to or for Microsoft?
Notice the date? The coupon is supposed to expire on April 12, 2010.
I got the email on May 11, 2010.
After a brief phone call with Best Buy, it turns out the coupon date is actually Dec 12th. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what the actual report failure was. A clue: there is nothing wrong with the data.