It was announced on 11 November that SAP has acquired experience management specialist Qualtrics in an $8 billion deal. The acquisition comes as SAP, Germany’s largest company by market value, is shifting its enterprise software business to the cloud from traditional on-premises services, with the goal of becoming a one-stop shop for all digital offerings. It is SAP’s second-biggest acquisition ever, following the $8.3 billion purchase of travel and expense software company Concur in 2014.

Qualtrics sells market research and survey software to more than 9,000 customers, from Coca-Cola and BMW to the US Air Force and Walt Disney. It enables organisations to collect feedback and other data from across customers, employees, product and brand in order to build a picture of overall ‘customer experience’. The acquisition will allow SAP to combine its operational data with customer experience data from Qualtrics, enabling clients to incorporate real-time feedback into their strategies.

Speaking on the first day of the UK and Ireland SAP User Group annual conference, Adaire Fox-Martin, a member of SAP’s executive board in charge of Global Customer Operations, said that the aim of the acquisition was to flesh-out what SAP users can do for customers.

“Qualtrics provides experience data from the customer experience, how they perceive and feel about your products, good, services. SAP will provide the operational data from CRM, ERP and HCM,” said Fox-Martin.

She continued: “The result, we believe, will be a very unique end-to-end experience and operational management system from the point of the very first interaction you have with the customer through to delivery and in after-sales service.”