MarTech » Customer experience » SAP gives up its stake in Qualtrics

SAP gives up its stake in Qualtrics

The experience management platform will be acquired by Silver Lake and CPP investments for $12.5 billion.

Kim Davis on March 14, 2023 at 2:55 pm | Reading time: 2 minutes

Global software and ERP giant SAP has sold its entire stake in Qualtrics as part of a definitive agreement to acquire the experience management platform entered into by Silver Lake, a technology investment firm, and Canada Pension Plan Investments. SAP had owned a controlling share in Qualtrics.

The all-cash agreement reflects a $12.5 billion valuation of Qualtrics.

SAP and Qualtrics. Since SAP bought Qualtrics in late 2018, it has moved to integrate its AI-driven experience management capabilities across SAP’s customer experience solutions, including SAP Service Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud. SAP says that Qualtrics has more than tripled its revenue since the acquisition. SAP floated the platform in 2020 but retained a majority share.

Qualtrics describes itself as an online survey tool. It uses AI to measure both customer satisfaction and employee engagement in real time. It claims to improve customer experience, team performance and product design.

“SAP intends to remain a close go-to-market and technology partner, servicing joint customers and continuing to contribute to Qualtrics’ success,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein in a release.

Why we care. What to make of the SAP Qualtrics story? Towards the end of the 2010s, SAP — under then CEO Bill McDermott — was plainly looking to put its CX offerings on a footing to rival Adobe, Oracle and, above all, Salesforce. Building on its 2013 acquisition of successful, Swiss-based commerce solution Hybris, by 2018 SAP had added Gigya and Callidus Cloud to its portfolio and launched C/4 HANA.

C/4 HANA was the umbrella term for SAP’s CX offerings — and the name was aimed at positioning it alongside SAP’s leading enterprise ERP suite S/4 HANA. Although Qualtrics joined the party, SAP never seemed to completely absorb it, as it had Hybris, for instance, which became SAP Commerce Cloud.

Qualtrics is the clear leader in its category and now begins another chapter in its story under long-time CEO Zig Serafin.

Dig deeper: Why did SAP buy Qualtrics?

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About the author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.