A journalist asked Apotheker if Business Objects would not be "one acquisition too many."

"I don't think so," Apotheker said, saying the companies' products target discrete markets. "I'm not saying there's no overlap whatsoever, but there's not much at all."

At least one industry analyst disagreed, however.

"Product overlaps abound, especially in the business performance solutions area," Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman said in a blog posting. "This leaves SAP with a daunting challenge to rationalize three planning/budgeting solutions, three for financial consolidations, two for profitability management, and several products for strategy management and performance scorecarding."

Still, Apotheker and Liautaud promised benefits for both companies' customers.

SAP users will have BI reporting capabilities embedded deeply in their ERP applications, giving "real time feedback to know if their decisions bear fruit or not," Apotheker said. SAP will also bring its search, in-memory database and master data management technologies to Business Objects' software, he said.

"This is a growth merger, not a merger aimed at cost reduction," Apotheker said.