Finalised Acquisition

Qualtrics is the global pioneer of the experience management (XM) software category that enables organizations to thrive in today’s experience economy. The combination accelerates the new XM category by combining Qualtrics’ experience data with operational data from SAP software to power the economy. SAP and Qualtrics will offer businesses the means to deliver exceptional customer, employee, product and brand experiences.

The acquisition was originally announced shortly after Qualtrics, filed S-1 documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to go public with an IPO carrying an estimated valuation of $4.8 billion. Qualtrics quickly withdrew their IPO paperwork after SAP expressed interest in acquiring the company.

Ryan Smith will continue to lead Qualtrics, which will retain its current leadership, personnel, branding and company culture and operate as an entity within the Cloud Business Group at SAP. Qualtrics will continue to maintain dual headquarters in Provo, Utah, and Seattle, Washington.

Combining Forces

The acquisition is an opportunity to combine Qualtrics’ customer experience data with operational data generated by SAP’s ERP and CRM applications to provide managers and executives with deeper insights about their businesses.  This union will help organisations better manage supply chains, networks, employees and core processes.

Experience data (X-data) focuses on obtaining and tapping the value of outside-in customer, employee, product and brand feedback. Combining Qualtrics’ experience data and insights with unparalleled operational data (O-data) from SAP software will enable customers to manage supply chains, networks, employees and core processes better. Together, SAP and Qualtrics will deliver a unique end-to-end experience and operational management system to power the economy.

By combining forces with SAP’s extensive global sales force and client base, Qualtrics will be able to scale rapidly around the world. SAP has a strong track record of accelerating the growth of the innovative companies it acquires, as exemplified by the rapid success of SAP’s recent acquisitions.

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Merging Service Providers Syntax is a portfolio company of Novacap TMT IV and Novacap TMT V, a Montreal based private equity firm, which provided the equity financing for the acquisition. FIT manages SAP applications in the Cloud for Enterprise customers in Europe, America and Asia. This strategic acquisition enables both companies to combine their specific strengths and be a service provider for new markets with a growing portfolio.

This acquisition expands Syntax’s service offerings in the SAP market and complements existing business operations, making Syntax one of the most compelling multi ERP, multi cloud providers in the industry. Syntax can now provide end to end solutions for customers, offering them flexibility with both Oracle and SAP ecosystem expertise and serve them worldwide. Additionally, Syntax will leverage their current Private, Hybrid and Public cloud capabilities to accelerate FIT’s growth in SAP.

FIT is a global leader in managed IT services that specializes in helping companies optimize mission-critical technology that runs their businesses, using SAP applications. In fact, FIT has had a long-lasting relationship with SAP’s founding fathers who started collaborating with the Freudenberg Group, a parent company of FIT, almost 50 years ago.

A Great FIT

“The acquisition of FIT represents an ideal investment for Novacap leveraging Syntax’s development as a global cloud service provider” commented Ted Mocarski, a Senior Partner at Novacap and Chairman of the Syntax Board of Directors. ” FIT’s strong position in the market represents an exciting growth opportunity for Syntax. We look forward to supporting and working with Syntax through this exciting part of its history.”

“We are excited by the opportunity of joining forces with FIT and extend our reach to the SAP ecosystem. This acquisition will enable us to increase our presence in geographies we had previously targeted for growth, such as Europe and Asia.” says Christian Primeau, CEO of Syntax. “Their devotion to excellence combined with their expertise and strong customer focus and value for corporate social responsibility made it an obvious choice for Syntax.”

The acquisition, which is expected to be completed later this quarter, is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals and the approval of the antitrust authorities. Until the deal is complete, the companies will continue to operate separately. Terms of the transaction will not be disclosed. “We are grateful to have found a strategic partner, who can provide FIT a boost from inorganic growth, which can open up new customer segments. I am pleased with the prospect of joining Syntax; the combined entities will accelerate new and exciting opportunities that can only lead to future success for our customers and employees. Our values and strategies are aligned, we are both driven by innovation, have a strong customer orientation and focus on team spirit,” says Horst Reichardt, Global CEO of FIT.

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Early 2019 Acquisition

Qualtrics was founded in 2002. To this day, Qualtrics is a privately held experience management company, with co-headquarters in Provo, Utah and Seattle, Washington, in the United States. Qualtrics’ subscription based survey software is used by businesses to track customer and employee experiences and obtain feedback on products and brands. The company has over 9,000 customers globally.

The news of the acquisition comes two days after Qualtrics, filed S-1 documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to go public with an IPO carrying an estimated valuation of $4.8 billion. The acquisition should be complete in the first half of 2019.  

The acquisition is an opportunity to combine Qualtrics’ customer experience data with operational data generated by SAP’s ERP and CRM applications to provide managers and executives with deeper insights about their businesses.  This union will help organisations better manage supply chains, networks, employees and core processes.

Possible Product Integration

SAP is expected to integrate Qualtrics software with some of its software products, including C/4HANA suite of CRM applications. That product set is itself made up of several SAP acquisitions including Callidus Software.

SAP SuccessFactors, the employee talent management application, is another potential application primed for integration with Qualtrics’ applications.

When the acquisition is complete in the beginning of 2019, Qualtrics will operate as an entity within SAP’s Cloud Business Group. Qualtrics will maintain its leadership and personnel: Ryan Smith, one of Qualtrics’ founders and current CEO, will continue to lead the company. It will also maintain its dual headquarters in Provo, Utah and Seattle, Washington.

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The acquisition is the latest step in itelligence India’s plans for growth in India as the move toward digitalisation sweeps across the nation.

“With more than 1300 employees, we are now one of the leading SAP partners in the subcontinent,” said Norbert Rotter, CEO, itelligence.

Hyderabad-based vCentric was named SAP S/4 HANA Partner of the Year in India for the past three years, among many other accolades. The fast-growing company has both demonstrated expertise in India and a broad Indian customer base. Exactly the combination that itelligence was seeking for its expansion plans.

“The acquisition of vCentric allows us to offer services across different geographies in India and different segments. itelligence will continue its industry focus to deliver the quality and best fit solutions to its customers,” said Sanjeev Deshpande, managing director, itelligence India.

Although vCentric was among the worldwide finalists of the Pinnacle Awards in the S/4 HANA Partner of the Year category at the SAPPHIRE NOW event in May, it was itelligence that won the award this year. itelligence India was also recently named a ‘Best Place to Work’ in Hyderabad.

“We are very excited to be part of the itelligence family and together we will grow and serve our customer base in India and the subcontinent with best in class solutions and services offerings,” said Venugopal Uppalapati, past chairman, vCentric. He now becomes a member of the executive management team of itelligence India.

itelligence, an SAP platinum partner, is a leading international SAP solutions provider that employs about 6,600 employees in 24 countries worldwide. Its services range from consulting and licensing to application management and from hosting and reseller services to proprietary industry-specific solutions.

Terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.

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CenturyLink is an SAP global premium supplier partner with extensive services for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, delivering global network, hosting, IT managed services, big data and analytics.

SEAL Consulting brings expertise in implementing a wide spectrum of SAP solutions across the manufacturing, retail and consumer products industries, including ECC, S/4HANA, Business Suite, BW/4HANA, Ariba, Hybris, CRM, Fiori, and Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence. The company also has solution implementation experience in supply chain management (SCM) and governance, risk and compliance (GRC).

“This acquisition significantly expands our existing integrated SAP solutions, leveraging our hosting and cloud infrastructures to add broader SAP implementation and application managed services capabilities to our portfolio,” said Girish Varma, president, global IT services and new market development, CenturyLink. “The acquisition also gives us deeper expertise in several additional industry verticals.”

“SEAL’s mission has always been to keep clients ahead in fast-changing environments by offering services ranging from implementations to post-implementation support and outsourcing,” said Badal Patel, president and CEO, SEAL Consulting. He said their new home at CenturyLink will enable them to continue to work toward that vision and deliver innovation to many more customers.

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The technology supports forecasting for budget planning and optimisation, and within Hybris marketing will provide the data to understand and automate marketing opportunities. While the Abakus software will continue to be available as a stand-alone product, the integration of the Abakus technology will assist CMOs and CFOs to understand customer interactions across all devices and the incremental value of marketing on business outcomes.

“Our goal is to offer the first omni-channel customer engagement solution on the market that helps our customers drive contextual experiences that lead to measurable business value,” said Brian Walker, chief strategy officer. “Marketers need a trusted solution to understand what is driving sales – one based on real data, not ad-hoc models – to ensure they are using the optimal mix of marketing channels and messages.”

According to SAP Hybris, with the integration of Abakus, customers will benefit from an end-to-end marketing cloud solution that provides a single unified view of the customer across disparate systems, automation of planning, personalisation and optimisation, and advanced analytics attribution to show what is driving sales.

“We are delighted to join the global SAP family and look forward to integrating Abakus with SAP Hybris Marketing,” said Alex Saldanha, CEO and co-founder, Abakus. “The acquisition is a result of the alignment of our two companies’ visions to solve for customer centric marketing performance through real-time software. We look forward to delivering even greater value to Abakus and SAP customers through this merger.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017, with the Abakus technology to be integrated into Hybris at this time.

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Named a leading provider of BDaaS by Forrester Research, Altiscale will “operate as a focused and integrated BDaaS offering from SAP to help accelerate operationalise big data deployment in the enterprise”.

According to a statement by Ken Tsai, vice president and head of cloud platform and data management, product marketing, SAP, the company’s decision to acquire Altiscale was driven by a number of factors, including that they have complementary approaches to implementing enterprise big data solutions, and share an overall focus on helping enterprises derive business value from data and successfully leverage big data.

“Since Altiscale is a leader in Big-Data-as-a-Service based on Hadoop and Spark, it enables SAP to drive end-to-end value in Big Data across the technology, data platform, PaaS, analytics, and application stack,” Tsai said.

According to Tsai,  through its initial foray into big data processing with SAP HANA Vora, SAP saw challenges faced by businesses in the provisioning, scaling and operation of Hadoop in a production environment.

“Altiscale directly addresses these challenges, providing the customer with full-service Hadoop and Spark in the cloud to boost performance, eliminate roadblocks, and accelerate customer go-live. The combination of Altiscale and SAP HANA Vora will enable SAP to provide a holistic and accelerated big data solution, allowing businesses to quickly achieve positive business impact from big data,” said Tsai.

Altiscale’s Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) capabilities will also enable SAP to offer a more comprehensive and robust enterprise solution.

Altiscale’s use cases cover a range of industries, including financial services, media, ad tech and marketing analytics, pharmaceutical and telecommunications, for applications such as advertising optimisation, drug research, churn analysis, fraud detection, and supply chain optimisation.

SAP and Altiscale are now working together to synchronise both companies’ technology, products and market perspectives, and will work towards integrating the Altiscale Data Cloud into the SAP portfolio.

Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst, Constellation Research, has given his take on the announcement here, and says the acquisition is a good move by SAP, as it needed to have native Hadoop, HDD-based big data capabilities to operate use case where in-memory was either commercially or not even technically feasible.

“With Altiscale, SAP now only addresses this part – but also the know-how challenge that is surrounding big data. At Constellation, we see more than 66 per cent of big data projects that are live and delivering value seeing interruption because of know-how issues, vendor changes, new software, new consultants etc. So SAP gains both product capabilities and services capabilities; the combination is crucial,” said Mueller.

However, he said SAP has taken a long time to get to this place and now needs to move fast.

“Clarity on where data resides, which IaaS platforms will be supported, etc needs to come soon, as enterprises make decisions on the providers and platforms for their next generation applications. SAP is always in the picture for ERP content; how much SAP can be in the picture for more of the next generation applications business will be determined by speed and clarity on moving to full Hadoop support.”

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The core of Vivanda’s business is an API-enabled, predictive food personalisation services platform that allows its partners to personalise their web food content and gain insights on their consumers’ eating habits and taste preferences.

Built on proprietary access to culinary research, food and sensory science, and understanding food choices FlavorPrint technology is a food and flavour genome mapping 16,000 aroma chemicals to 33 flavours and 17 textures, along with dietary and nutrition attributes and a comprehensive library of ingredients, products and recipes.

Together, SAP and Vivanda will enable food industry companies to use FlavorPrint technology for enhanced consumer engagement and targeted personalised food and beverage recommendations as well as advanced big data analytics.

“The SAP strategic investment in Vivanda will expand the collaboration between the two companies and will further enable food companies using solutions enabled by SAP HANA to leverage the FlavorPrint technology and data collected to engage and connect with consumers in more personalised and relevant ways,” said E.J. Kennedy, SVP consumer products, industry business solutions, SAP.

“It is our goal to help our food industry partners to grow profitably by delivering increasingly personalised experiences and outcomes directly to consumers. Profitable growth results from providing more targeted brand experiences and outcomes in context with greater convenience and value beyond simply price, and by leveraging consumer interactions to drive innovation and improve new product success rates. Vivanda and SAP together will deliver on both areas.”

“Consumer research shows that the number one driver for selecting food is taste preference, and consumers are craving personalized recommendations on products and services with regard to preferences on taste, texture, diet and nutrition to inform choice,” said Jerry Wolfe, CEO and founder of Vivanda.

“Manufacturers and retailers are struggling at unprecedented levels to meet their customer expectations on this point. At Vivanda we digitised taste, allowing our omnichannel partners to better meet their consumers’ needs with an enhanced food experience through personalisation and added insight.”

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Headquartered in the UK, Bluefin is an independent consultancy specialising in SAP HANA, and with a track record in helping businesses to manage digital transformations across the entire SAP portfolio. Bluefin also has offices in Malaysia, Singapore and the United States.

The acquisition is expected to help Mindtree customers harmonise front-end customer experience and back-end systems.

The relationship will also allow both parties to expand into new market segments – with Bluefin’s strong European client base supporting Mindtree’s efforts to strengthen its presence on the Continent, while also allowing BlueFin to take its HANA expertise into the US market, by leveraging Mindtree’s presence there.

“We are very excited about the synergies both Mindtree and Bluefin bring in the digital space. The acquisition will strengthen our position to offer the full spectrum of SAP services,” said Krishnakumar Natarajan, CEO and MD, Mindtree.

Bluefin Solutions group chief executive James Appleby, said by combining their SAP expertise with Mindtree’s digital capability, Bluefin will be able to offer greater scale and a “far superior” range of services from business process optimisation to IT organisation design.

Rob Enslin, executive board member and president of Global Customer Operations, SAP, also spoke in support of the acquisition.

“Bluefin Solutions has achieved success in the marketplace thanks to their strong team and early-adopter status with the SAP HANA platform. I congratulate Mindtree for strengthening their ability to help customers implement a next-generation platform for the digital economy.”

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oXya is an SAP partner, and both helps IT organisations manage cloud environments and designs the infrastructure for more effective and efficient implementations of SAP solutions, including the SAP HANA platform.

The oXya acquisition is expected to close by the end of March, when the company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of HDS. The business will continue to be led by oXya VP and chairman Frederic de Belloy, who will report to Hicham Abdessamad, HDS executive vice president, Global Services.

According to HDS, the acquisition will bring to its partners and customers:

• An extended portfolio of HDS cloud and managed services for implementation of solutions from SAP, including SAP HANA.
• Broad experience and expertise among the network of HDS partners who have capabilities with SAP solutions, increasing the ability of HDS to jointly deliver and manage large environments.
• Additional options to realise Hitachi Unified Compute Platform solution capabilities for environments based on SAP, including HANA.

“Today’s partners and customers demand as-a-service options that enable them to keep pace with market dynamics like cloud, while transforming the way they conduct business,” said Abdessamad. “oXya offers an expanded set of application-as-a-service offerings, both in private cloud and hybrid cloud. They have vast experience with managing large SAP solution-based environments and a history of excellent customer satisfaction.

“With its SAP-as-a-service offerings, oXya brings applications as a service, which is a frequent customer request and a bridge into solutions for analytics and Social Innovation,” he said.

de Belloy said oXya is pleased to build on its relationship as a Hitachi Cloud Service Provider.

“Combining efforts with Hitachi Data Systems and its partners will allow us to deliver to customers even more innovative solutions to gain insights from their data while expanding global coverage for our services.”

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