I searched online - seems that when SAP bought Sybase, net revenues of Sybase were around $1b - this was only one product in their portfolio.
Is it true that the product was making $1b / year?
Is it true that the product was making $1b / year?
I'd bet the product has seen significant growth in the mobile / IoT era. Applications that work offline and synchronizes later are a pain to build. Seems like the kind of infrastructure that exists in every police car these days.
Personally I think the future of desktop applications should be designed around the premise of localhost first and cloud second. The ability of the locally host application to synchronize to the cloud or central repository (similar to rsync and Git) should be the default not the other way around (I am looking at you Microsoft Teams). Technically there should be no different between people working independently with their local copy of data to be merged centrally later, and an offline application with an intermittent internet connection.
Now with readily available VPN tools like Wireguard becoming more popular the notion of using web applications for distributed authoring and collaboration, etc, is not necessary anymore. But if you insist to use web based technology there is always protocol like webdav to the rescue. If you do not want either of them (VPN and webdav), the recently announced SMB over QUIC can be a very good alternative solution [1].
[1]https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-ove...
I remember where I work, the product went from 'divest' to 'retain' following the acquisition.