In a deal with repercussions for enterprise application development, SAP has announced plans to acquire analytics vendor Qualtrics. Focused on acquiring and analyzing experiential data, Qualtrics offers survey platforms and tools for quantifying customer interactions, employee engagement and exit interviews.
“SAP already touches 77 percent of the world’s transactions,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “When you combine our operational data with Qualtrics’ experience data, we will accelerate the XM category with an end-to-end solution with immediate global scale.”
Robert Enslin, who heads up SAP’s cloud computing group, added, “The next evolution of enterprise applications has begun with a real-time connection between the (experience) data in the system of action and the (operations) data within the system of record. Our ability to apply intelligence and machine learning atop these co-joined data sets unleashes the unprecedented power of the new experience economy.”
