German business software giant SAP acquired Right Hemisphere for an undisclosed amount; Right Hemisphere is a company that develops 3D visualization tools for enterprise users. the company’s goal is to simplify employees’ workflows and overall efficiency adding another elemental to usual collaboration and communication.

“Employees will be able to make process and procedural adjustments on the fly, and sales and customer relations teams will be able to provide their customers with a photo-realistic visualization of the final product from any location, allowing them to give feedback before the product is delivered.”

This is a part of a much broader effort by SAP to expand beyond its core ERP business to other areas, such as mobile and big data. One way it’s doing that is by making a lot of partnerships and expanding its ecosystem, most recently yesterday.

Linux distributor Red Hat said yesterday that  Linux 6 has been certified by SAP to run SAP business applications. This is a notable milestone for both companies, because it will likely attract quite a few customers that are looking to run their SAP BI software in an open-source (and consequently  more cost effective)  environment.

Over in the mobile playing ground, another team up just bumped up the value of Sybase Unwired Platform v2.0. Unwired is a mobile development offering that is powered by SUP middleware. The latter today introduced version 2.1 of its product, which comes with an expanded, standalone SDK and an OData SDK.

This, with its partner ecosystem and acquisitions, is something SAP will need to be able to deliver the revenue increase it promised to its shareholders by 2015, but these also tie in with what Jeff Kelly refers to as the company’s balancing act. Currently most of its earnings are generated from customers using legacy systems, Kelly explained, and the firm is slowly pushing its HANA big data platform to try and turn this situation the other way around.