SAP’s $1.5BN Acquisition of WalkMe: 3 Hot Takes

Deep dive into SAP's latest acquisition and find out why CX leaders should stand up and take notice

4
SAP’s $1.5BN Acquisition of WalkMe: 3 Hot Takes
Data & AnalyticsNews Analysis

Published: October 3, 2024

Charlie Mitchell

In September, SAP completed its $1.5BN move for WalkMe, the digital adoption platform (DAP).

The platform sits on top of a tech stack, offering visibility into the applications and workflows the organization is running.

In doing so, WalkMe identifies inefficiencies, recommends fixes, and suggests where the business can automate and build better workflows.

Upon announcing the acquisition, Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, stated:

We are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.

As enterprises increase their investment in cloud and AI applications, having this single source of truth for business transformations is an attractive proposition.

After all, this granular assessment of cloud application and AI usage allows businesses to spot waste and opportunities.

As such, SAP can further support customers in evaluating their current stack and help them pivot to a more agile cloud environment.

Ultimately, that may offer a much-needed shot in the arm to the RISE with SAP framework, and the first of the following three hot takes dives deeper into this possibility.

1. The Acquisition Bolsters SAP LeanIX, Signavio, and Joule

While this all sounds exciting, SAP already has a DAP: SAP Companion, part of the vendor’s Enable Now offering.

Businesses often combine these offerings to oversee large-scale business transformation projects, where they evolve from a current to a target state.

Together, they help enterprises understand their people, processes, and technology. So, if a business meaningfully touches one of these groups, it can track the impact on another.

These solutions are a cornerstone of RISE with SAP, which offers a framework to businesses to drive digital transformation projects forward and run more intelligent behind-the-scenes operations.

Add WalkMe to the mix, and that combination becomes more powerful. Indeed, it will offer new insight into how employees leverage technology, GenAI usage, license distribution, and more.

Interestingly, SAP could also take capabilities from the WalkMe AI Assistant to augment Joule, its Copilot, so it offers unique in-app guidance.

For instance, it may alert a supervisor if a specific field within an app their team leverages is prone to an input error so they can immediately address the issue. That’s just one quick, significant example of how WalkMe could help to enhance SAP’s virtual assistant.

2. WalkMe Is Unlikely to Replace SAP Enable Now & Companion… For Now

While this all sounds exciting, SAP already has a DAP: SAP Companion, which is part of the vendor’s Enable Now offering.

Yet, WalkMe offers more advanced analytics. For example, it can provide additional insight into where users get stuck within an app, where processes fail, and where employees may need extra training.

So, does SAP Companion have a future? Yes, certainly over the short term.

After all, it integrates tightly with SAP Fiori-based applications – which include S/4HANA – enabling it to capture critical context from SAP screens.

Nonetheless, WalkMe is generally better at integrating with browser-based, third-party applications like Salesforce and ServiceNow.

As such, SAP will likely keep SAP Companion in the short term for Fiori-based applications. However, it will use WalkMe elsewhere, perhaps packaging the offering for Rise with SAP customers.

Whatever the case, expect some branding changes, even if Companion continues to overlay SAP applications as it currently does.

Meanwhile, SAP Enable Now extends far beyond Companion, including technologies for simulations and courseware. As these tools expand on WalkMe’s current offering, don’t expect the overall offering to change all that much.

3. CX Leaders Should Stand Up & Take Notice

WalkMe is not just a CX technology. It’s an enterprise-wide tech transformation solution.

The overall interest in such solutions highlights how more enterprises aim to ensure greater visibility into how their tech stack is performing.

Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, hopes that trend will extend across the customer experience stack. On LinkedIn, she noted:

If you don’t know what your SaaS or subscription customers are doing, adopting, utilizing, valuing…if digital adoption isn’t one of your critical proactive measures in an experience-driven success motion…can you really call it a customer success strategy?

“In many ways, this pick-up can impact the next incarnation of how we, in CX strategy, actually work.”

Some individual CX vendors are doing more to provide greater insight into how businesses can better leverage their applications.

For instance, with its Customer Success Score, Salesforce is helping customers to more easily isolate opportunities for value that they’re not capturing.

However, as collaboration grows between service, sales, and marketing teams, the opportunity to leverage each other’s tools, unify processes, and unlock efficiencies grows greater.

As such, the observability capacity of an overlaying DAP platform will become increasingly valuable.

A Final Thought: SAP Is Preparing for Autonomous AI

Currently, businesses buy tools for their employees to utilize. But, in the future, AI Agents will leverage those, too.

Indeed, that’s the vision that Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, recently laid out when announcing his company’s new partnership with Salesforce.

These AI Agents will understand tasks, leverage those tools, and even work together to solve business problems.

In this future, a DAP may offer even greater value, spotting new opportunities for an AI Agent to perform actions not only within an app but also between them.

That’s a tantalizing prospect, albeit one that sounds far away from the current enterprise reality.

Yet, it’s a vision that SAP is also working with NVIDIA to realize as the tech giants collaborate to fine-tune LLMs for sector-specific innovation and increase compossibility within the SAP stack via NVIDIA NIM microservices.

As such, WalkMe may be just one significant part of a much broader vision for the enterprise technology of tomorrow.

 

Digital TransformationEnterpriseMergers and Acquisitions

Brands mentioned in this article.

SAP
Featured

Share This Post