Quickies: DDD acquires, SAP beats

It’s earnings season, so there’s all sorts of news coming out. Two quick items to note: 3D Systems announced that has acquired Viztu Technologies, the developer of an online platform that turns pictures and videos into printable 3D objects. DDD plans to integrate Viztu into Cubify.com, and Viztu’s founders, Ash Martin and Tom Milnes, will join 3D Systems. I’m not familiar with Viztu, but am really taken by this bit in the company’s “The Team” description: “Two guys from MIT meet in a class. One speaks tech, the other speaks business, and Viztu is born. What started as a medical imaging application to improve chronic wound care […] has turned into a computer vision powerhouse, freeing these amazing 3D tools from the lab and releasing them upon the world… The rest will be history!” Further down that same page Mr. Milnes, Founder/CTO, describes himself as a PhD candidate whose “most productive hours are those that come after midnight and he knows that nothing says progress like the sight of sunrise over a bank of computer monitors”. Mr. Martin, Founder/CEO, “loves that he gets to wear T-shirts to work, and was born with a wrench and a hammer in his hands.” I’ve got to wonder how these guys will fit into a publicly-traded corporate culture. No financial details were given. SAP announced results for Q2 that were good enough to make it Germany’s most valuable company (measured by market capitalization), overtaking Siemens for the first time.  According to bloomberg.com, SAP was worth as much as €62.8 billion ($76 billion) today, as compared to Siemens’s €61.8 billion. It’s important to note, though, that Siemens’s revenue was €73.5 billion in its latest fiscal year, drawfing SAP’s at €14.2 billioneur. Anyway, what is really interesting about SAP’s Q2 results is that software revenue increased 26% from last year to €1.06 billion, while total revenue was up 18% to €3.9 billion. Even as parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa are reeling in debt crises and civil unrest, SAP was able to grow revenue from new software licenses in the region by 20% (excluding currency impact). SAP’s CEO did say that small and medium enterprises are, right now, not buying much — this may play into MuM’s cautious statements yesterday. SAP reiterated its outlook for fiscal 2012, with non-IFRS software and software-related service revenue growing 10%-12% at constant currencies, including about 2% of growth from the SuccessFactors acquisition.