German software powerhouse SAP acquired behavioral marketing expert SeeWhy, on Tuesday, in a bid to strengthen its marketing cloud and integrate some of its features to Hybris, the e-commerce platform, it acquired in June 2013.
In a statement, SAP highlighted SeeWhy's forte, the ability to convert customer interactions into sales by using "1-to-1 personalized marketing based on real-time customer behavior".
Seewhy claims to have helped more than 4000 brands get back around $500 million (about £300m, AU$540m) annually in lost sales. Its secret sauce, as it puts it, is a proprietary solution based on Big Data, In-Memory architecture called Conversion Manager.
Buy, buy, buy
It continuously analyses hundreds of millions of events, crunching them through Seewhy's patented analytics engine and delivering tailored, individual actions, automatically and in real-time to reduce churn and drop-outs.
CORE, as the platform is called, integrates with more than 30 e-commerce, advertising, email service providers, web analytics services and social networks to achieve this level of customer interaction.
Neither SAP nor SeeWhy disclosed details of the transaction but the latter is expected to be completed by the end of June 2014.
SeeWhy's acquisition allows SAP to be better positioned to fend the growing threats of Oracle, Salesforce and IBM which have been investing heavily on enterprise commerce and customer relation marketing solutions.
SAP has been feeling the heat and announced last week that it was laying off around 2500 employees or 3% of its global workforce in a bid to improved its bottom line.
