"With Sybase, we see the opportunity to dramatically accelerate our presence in mobility," SAP CTO Vishal Sikka said during a conference call to discuss the deal. "We can untether and mobilize every single deployment we have of core SAP products, as well as the SAP and Business Objects analytical products."

SAP said earlier Wednesday that it plans to , offering $65 per share, a 44 percent premium over its average stock price over the past three months. SAP expects to close the deal in July, so long as it passes muster with competition regulators and enough Sybase shareholders support it.

Sybase is still best known in some quarters as a database company, and SAP executives talked a bit Wednesday about Sybase's in-column database technology, called IQ, which helps boost analytics and data warehouse performance. But Sybase also sells a set of products that are widely used to deploy business applications on smartphones and other mobile devices, and it's those products that SAP seems most interested in.

"Many of our customers, especially the largest ones, are trying to run real-time enterprises, and it's hard to do that when mobile workers don't have the data at their fingertips to make decisions in real time," said Jim Hagemann Snabe, one of SAP's co-CEOs.

SAP will use Sybase's mobile applications platform to let workers access their SAP business and analytics applications from all the major mobile device platforms. "This will literally connect the shop floor to the corner office," said Bill McDermott, SAP's other co-CEO.