by twieberneit | Feb 1, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On January 30, 2018 SAP announced that its subsidiary SAP America, Inc. has entered into an agreement to acquire Callidus Software Inc., a leader in sales performance management and CPQ software. With a price tag of around $2.4 bn this is the most expensive acquisition SAP has announced in quite a time. With this acquisition SAP gets closer to the target of assembling the “most complete and differentiated portfolio to manage today’s customer experience” and claims that the combination of the CallidusCloud Lead to Money suite in combination with its own (Hybris) customer engagement suite creates a “leading solution portfolio”. SAP intends to consolidate the CallidusCloud solution set into its Hybris portfolio, with the sales cloud being the technical integration point of the software. As usual, the existing management team will stay on board. The Bigger Picture According to the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrants for Sales Performance Management (dated 15 January, 2018) and Configure, Price, and Quote Application Suites (dated 29 January, 2018) SAP catapulted itself into the leadership position of Sales Performance Management and into a visionary position in the CPQ market. Forrester Research already in their Forrester Wave: Configure-Price-Quote Solutions, Q1 2017 placed CallidusCloud into the leader section of their wave. With SAP’s Hybris solutions, including Gigya, SAP already has a powerful customer engagement suite, albeit with some gaps, a significant of which got plugged with this acquisition. While SAP CPQ is fairly capable on the C and P there is some deficiency on the Q. And it bases on grandfather IPC – not a bad engine, but one that is getting tired. Friend...
