SAP to Take Qualtrics Public

Another large cloud competitor.  Previously mentioned here.  A key means of gathering customer data to drive emerging analytics?

CustomerThink:  SAP Takes Qualtrics Public

The News
On July 26, 2020, not two years after announcing the acquisition of Qualtrics, SAP announced its intent to take Qualtrics public. The timeline is yet to be communicated.

Their announcement.

What the press release basically says is that SAP’s cloud growth, including Qualtics was a ‘great success’. SAP itself wants to remain in control by keeping a majority stake in Qualtrics after the spin-off while Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith wants to be the ‘largest independent shareholder’.

SAP insists in it being fully committed to the Qualtrics XM platform as a key element of its Intelligent Enterprise strategy, but with Qualtrics being a part of the SAP ecosystem instead of being a part of SAP itself.

For your convenience the full press release is quoted here.

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced its intent to take Qualtrics public through an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States.

Qualtrics is the market leader and creator of the Experience Management (XM) category, a large, fast-growing and rapidly evolving market. SAP intends to remain the majority owner of Qualtrics. SAP’s primary objective for the IPO is to fortify Qualtrics’ ability to capture its full market potential within Experience Management. This will help to increase Qualtrics’ autonomy and enable it to expand its footprint both within SAP’s customer base and beyond.

“SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics has been a great success and has outperformed our expectations with 2019 cloud growth in excess of 40 percent, demonstrating very strong performance in the current setup,” SAP CEO Christian Klein said. “As Ryan Smith, Zig Serafin and I worked together, we decided that an IPO would provide the greatest opportunity for Qualtrics to grow the Experience Management category, serve its customers, explore its own acquisition strategy and continue building the best talent. SAP will remain Qualtrics’ largest and most important go-to-market and research and development (R&D) partner while giving Qualtrics greater independence to broaden its base by partnering and building out the entire experience management ecosystem.”

Qualtrics, which is part of SAP’s cloud portfolio, has operated with greater autonomy than other companies SAP had previously acquired. The founder and current management team of Qualtrics will continue to operate the company.

“When we launched the Experience Management category, our goal was always to help as many organizations as possible leverage the XM Platform as a system of action,” Qualtrics Founder Ryan Smith said. “SAP is an incredible partner with unprecedented global reach, and we couldn’t be more excited about continuing the partnership. This will allow us to continue building out the XM ecosystem across a broad array of partners.”   ... '