What have Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Adobe, SugarCRM and others Big Player 2019 made the headlines?
What happened in 2019 in the area of CRM MarTech with the software Big Player SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, SugarCrm, Adobe? Who made which acquisitions? One of them made headlines with a change of boss.
Who made which acquisitions?
Industry leader Salesforce has been investing in interesting companies via a venture fund since 2009. More than 300 companies have been financed out of the fund. Although the acquisition of Mulesoft in 2018 was also a big deal, Salesforce shot off with the biggest acquisition bird: Tableau with a value of 15.7 billion dollars. On top of that came CLICK for $1.35 billion.
In 2018, Adobe landed a real gem with Marketo. With $4.75 billion, Adobe reached deep into the box with both hands after spending $1.9 billion on Magento that same year. So 2019 was rather quiet.
What happened in the CRM and MarTech area at SAP?
SAP was rather idle in this sector in 2019. The Walldorf-based company had acquired Qualtrics – valued at around $8 billion – in 2018. The highlight from the perspective of many market observers was the not entirely surprising departure of CEO Bill McDermott. He left SAP (or did he have to leave?) at a time when for many people there were still no grey clouds in the SAP sky. However, a few wadded-up reports from the German SAP user group DSAG and industry whispers already hinted at the grey clouds. So McDermott probably said to himself, before I have to clean up my own problems here after the growth and the Qualtrics acquisition, it’s much more fun to do the setup work at ServiceNow.
SugarCRM was bought by a private equity company in 2018. 2019 was therefore a year of consolidation and repositioning.
Oracle reports only one acquisition worth mentioning in this area: CrowdTwist – highly rated by Forrester in the “Loyalty Technology Platform” category.
Microsoft also did not stand out with a mega-deal. Nevertheless, SAP and Microsoft announced an exciting cooperation in October. The aim of this cooperation is to make it easier to use SAP in the American clouds.
Conclusion and summary
Whether SAP will continue to benefit from the very expensive purchase of Qualtrics from 2018 is currently doubtful. Strategically, the purchases of Tableau (Salesforce) and Marketo (Adobe) seem to us to make the most strategic sense.
Picture: 1A Relations
Note: This is a machine translation. It is neither 100% complete nor 100% correct. We can therefore not guarantee the result.
