MICROSOFT has revealed the scale of its ambition to move into the business software market, confirming that it came close to buying Germany's SAP for more than E30 billion ($52 billion). Microsoft, which has more than $US50 billion ($71 billion) in cash reserves, said that it almost secured a deal with Europe's biggest software company but abandoned the talks because the deal would be too complex. An acquisition of SAP, the biggest maker of software used to manage large corporations, would have required Microsoft to make regulatory concessions before competition authorities in the US and Europe would consider allowing it.
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