The European Commission authorised, on 20 July, the proposed acquisition of Sybase, Inc. of the US by SAP AG of Germany. Both companies are active in the databases, middleware and enterprise application software (EAS) sectors. The activities of the parties overlap in the area of databases, data warehousing tools and mobile middleware. The Commission’s investigation confirmed that horizontal anti-competitive effects are unlikely to occur in any of the relevant markets. In addition, the merged entity will continue to face strong competition from numerous players in all relevant markets. Furthermore, the merged entity will not control a ‘must have’ product for which there would be no alternative and because of the strong competitive constraints exercised by other EAS vendors.