SAP is making its largest acquisition yet as it battles start-ups, including Salesforce.com, in selling software to clients that want to better understand their customers. The US$ 8-billion purchase of Qualtrics International, whose software gathers and analyses data, is meant to strengthen SAP’s offering in the customer relations management sector. That’s a field Europe’s biggest software company wants to gain a stronger foothold in because it’s growing faster than its core enterprise software business.
Based in Utah, Qualtrics collects data on customers, brand, employees and products — such as emails, social media posts and in-app data — to give companies insights into how their customers behave or feel about them. The start-up had been planning on listing on Nasdaq in a deal with a potential valuation of up to US$ 4.5 billion.