It had been up in the air for a while, but SAP has now completed its acquisition of WalkMe. Now that all antitrust hurdles have been cleared, SAP can take this publicly traded company off the stock market and into its arms, to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars (over 1.3 billion euros). WalkMe specializes in SaaS solutions and tooling for enterprise organizations.
WalkMe’s solutions help companies streamline software application workflows. In practice, WalkMe’s assets will end up in SAP’s AI copilot, Joule.
According to SAP’s press release, with the acquisition, WalkMe will disappear from the NASDAQ stock exchange where it was listed. Current shareholders of the acquired company will receive 14 dollars cash per share, representing a 45 percent bonus over the company’s closing price on June 4, 2024.
On that date, both parties agreed to the terms involved in the acquisition. WalkMe shares will be delisted after the close of trading today, at 4 p.m. in New York (10 p.m. in the central Europe).
Strengthening its position
SAP wants to strengthen its position in Business AI by purchasing WalkMe. The company has somewhat of an image as a tech dinosaur but is working hard to improve that now outdated image. To that end, it has undergone extensive transformation within its own ranks for some time.
In the past, SAP was organized so that product teams had a lot of freedom, with the goal of keeping the line-of-business as happy as possible. However, 20 to 30 percent of R&D budgets went to platform, integration, extensibility, and data harmonization. As a result, much of the budget was already lost, and innovation was stalled.
Major cleanup at SAP
SAP has cleaned house considerably in recent years, and a culture change has occurred. CEO Christian Klein recently acknowledged to Techzine that SAP also had to replace people to make this possible. Products have also been divested, things have been merged and above all, a lot has been modernized. For customers, the picture has become a lot clearer.
In the past, SAP wanted to do all development in-house. That is no longer the case. The company is now focusing on Business AI. The wealth of business data it has, can be used by the company to train very specific AI models for particular industries or use cases. The WalkMe acquisition should be seen in that light. The incorporation of this acquisition contributes to reducing unnecessary complexity at SAP.
Read more: Christian Klein: “SAP has the most modern cloud stack of all SaaS vendors”