The company has acquired privately held Finnish IP contact center and communication software provider Wicom Communications for an undisclosed sum. The purchase is quietly significant because it takes SAP into direct competition with players like Cisco and Avaya with whom it does not currently compete. It also provides a glimpse into SAP’s CRM vision.
People view business solutions, collaboration and communications as separate areas, said CEO Henning Kagermann, but applications of the future need to look with a single holistic view.
The primary aim of the acquisition is to integrate business systems, from customer focussed CRM to back office financials, with communications systems in order to streamline customer facing processes and enable employees across the enterprise to access the same knowledge and data. As Wicom points out, it is about making communications a core part of CRM and ERP, as it always should have been.
It is about communication business processes and delivering those business processes no matter where or what channel, added Bob Stutz, senior vice president and general manager, SAP CRM strategy and product. We see Wicom as the future of CRM.
Although the additional 200 customers will be a welcome addition to the SAP customer base, this acquisition is very much as technology acquisition, with strong strategic overtones, and fits with SAP’s overall business processes-centric view of the world.
SAP sees companies not just extending their business network and business processes beyond the enterprise but maturing them, and to make the most of that gaol it believes organizations need to be able to build and manage virtual business processes and teams, to enable them to make use of all the knowledge, resources and communication channels available to them. Wicom’s multi channel IP system adds that functionality for the first time.
The plan is to keep Wicom as an independent company for the time being but ultimately the intention is to integrate the software into SAP applications.
The second acquisition will plump up NetWeaver functionality through the addition of identity management technology from privately held Norwegian MaXware, which will allow uses to work across disparate systems and processes with security handled in real time. It will also allow SAP to step closer to Oracle in this area.
Identify management is becoming more important as organizations start to implement services that run across multiple, distributed applications and processes. While addressing the security issue, SAP is also stressing the value of identity management in reducing IT running costs, with CIO’s able to to take an integrated approach to the assigning and administration of user roles across multiple systems. With MaXware’s virtualization and user provisioning technologies, which are core to its identity management system, built as enterprise services according to SAP, they should be able to plug straight into NetWeaver.
As well as its technology, MaXware brings 300 customers to SAP. Terms of the deal were not disclosed; the acquisition is expected to close later this month.
