In June 2020, SAP C/4HANA, an umbrella term for SAP’s combined customer experience portfolio, has been rebranded as SAP Customer Experience.
In July 2020, SAP had made the headlines with its announcement of taking Qualtrics public through an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States to fortify its potential to capture its full market potential within the Experience Management category. Following the bold IPO move for Qualtrics, which was acquired by SAP in late 2018, the German company is making another investment strategy to beef up its customer engagement portfolio.
This month opened with SAP’s announcement to acquire Emarsys, an omnichannel customer engagement platform provider headquartered in Vienna, Austria. The acquisition is intended to enhance the SAP Customer Experience portfolio leveraging the expertise of Emarsys in e-commerce delivering hyper-personalised, omnichannel engagements in real-time, which helps organisations deliver relevant and impactful engagements.
Emarsys’ global footprint spans across13 offices including London, Berlin, Sydney, and Budapest, as well as a U.S. headquarters in Indianapolis. The cloud-based marketing company has over 800 employees and 1,500 customers worldwide including Australian clients Cue Clothing, Showpo, National Tiles, GlamCorner, and Total Tools.
Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, is optimistic about the new possibilities for SAP’s customers that are unique in the market. Emarsys customer engagement platform will soon be part of SAP S/4HANA and Experience Management technology from SAP and Qualtrics. He explained:
“The success of brands worldwide depends today on their ability to offer a compelling customer journey and to cater to the individual expectations of customers. To meet these expectations, front-office data must be integrated with back-office capabilities and with individual customer feedback.
Once the transaction closes, SAP will enable brands to connect every part of their business to the customer, including experience data. We will deliver a portfolio for a ‘commerce anywhere’ strategy allowing for hyper-personalised digital commerce experiences across all channels at any time.”
The acquisition will be completed in Q4 of 2020, subject to regulatory approval. The purchase price and other transaction details have not been disclosed as of this time.
Advancing SAP CX
In recent years, SAP has been building its CX portfolio with acquisitions of e-commerce and CRM software such as hybris, Coresystems, CallidusCloud, and Gigya products. These additions gave SAP’s portfolio a more robust field service, sales productivity, and data security capabilities. Add to SAP’s CX strategy the Qualtrics acquisition, which has been proven successful exceeding expectations and performing a 40{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} cloud growth in 2019.
Emarsys’ acqusition will enable SAP to expand further its customer engagement portfolio as it becomes part of the SAP Customer Experience business unit.
Bob Stutz, President, SAP Customer Experience, said:
“Customer engagement technology has evolved tremendously over the past decade, and in that time, Emarsys has emerged as a world-class platform that truly enables personalised, one-to-one digital interactions between brands and customers across all channels.”
“With Emarsys technology, SAP Customer Experience solutions can link commerce signals with the back office and activate the preferred channel of the customer with a relevant and consistently personalised message, allowing customers the freedom to choose their own engagement,” Stutz added.
Emarsys is known to empower digital marketing leaders and business owners in accelerating business outcomes. As an innovative and easy-to-use fully integrated cloud-based marketing platform, Emarsys enables organisations to deliver personalised customer interactions across e-mail, mobile, social, SMS, and the web at scale.
Embracing Evolution
Ohad Hecht, CEO of Emarsys, shared that the company’s rich tradition of innovation in digital marketing and SAP’s commitment to excellence and innovation in customer experience is an exciting next step to Emarsys evolution.
“We’re confident that, once we have regulatory approval, our customers and partners will quickly benefit from synergies between the Emarsys platform and the SAP Customer Experience portfolio,” Hecht stressed.
Hagai Hartman, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Emarsys, said:
“Success in today’s market relies on brands delivering personalised experiences powered by a holistic view of each consumer that connects digital engagement data with supply chain data in real-time.
Together Emarsys and SAP can create a new paradigm for digital commerce focused on the consumer.”
