OREANDA-NEWS. September 25, 2017. SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Gigya, a market leader for customer identity and access management. Major independent analyst firms, most recently Forrester Research,1 have positioned Gigya as a top vendor in this field.

Gigya’s customer identity and access management platform helps companies build digital relationships with their customers. Its platform allows companies to manage customers’ profile, preference, opt-in and consent settings, with customers maintaining control of their data at all times. Customers opt in and register via Gigya’s registration-as-a-service, which addresses changing geographical privacy issues and manages compliance requirements such as the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Gigya currently manages 1.3 billion customer identities in order to build identity-driven relationships for its enterprise clients.

Gigya’s technology provides new capabilities to consumers across channels and touch points, builds rich intelligent profiles and creates a consent-based approach to personalization across sales, service and marketing. Gigya, an SAP Hybris2 partner since 2013, has customers already using a solution extension from SAP Hybris and Gigya. This acquisition will enable the teams to further build upon this existing strong relationship.

“Gigya brings a wealth of skills and expertise that will significantly enhance the SAP® Hybris® Profile solution and allow us to take leadership of the emerging customer identity and access management market,” said Carsten Thoma, president and cofounder of SAP Hybris. “Consumer trust is the main currency to succeed for customer-driven organizations. This is what Gigya is known and recognized for.”

By way of the acquisition, SAP Hybris intends to become the first organization to offer a cloud-based data platform enabling companies to profile and convert new customers, gather accurate conclusions from disparate consumer engagement sources and collect data for enhanced consumer choices that are in line with regulations.

“Combining the data matching and enrichment capabilities of SAP Hybris Profile with Gigya’s consent-based identity data and access management platform will allow us to identify consumers across channels and offer a robust single consumer profile,” said Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya. “This is a vital step for digitalizing businesses because companies need to be able to draw accurate conclusions seamlessly across all channels, including web, mobile, in-store or connected devices, and the Internet of Things, as well as collect data about consumer preferences. Together we are well positioned to drive more effective marketing, sales and service through data, while the customer stays in control of how much data is shared.”

Gigya has more than 300 employees and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company’s operations will become part of the SAP Hybris business unit for customer engagement and commerce. The transaction is expected to close in the final quarter of 2017, subject to regulatory approval. Terms of the transaction are not disclosed.

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1 “The Forrester Wave™: Customer Identity and Access Management, Q2 2017.”

2 SAP Hybris is a brand name launched in January 2016 to represent the SAP solutions for customer engagement and commerce as well as the offerings, employees, and business of acquired company hybris AG, which continues to be the legal entity until integration with SAP is complete.

About SAP Hybris Solutions
SAP Hybris solutions provide omnichannel customer engagement and commerce software that allows organizations to build up a contextual understanding of their customers in real time, deliver a more impactful, relevant customer experience, and sell more goods, services and digital content across every touch point, channel and device. Through customer data management, context-driven marketing tools and unified commerce processes, SAP Hybris solutions have helped some of the world’s leading organizations to attract, retain and grow a profitable customer base. SAP Hybris software for customer engagement and commerce provides organizations with the foundation, framework and business tools to create a holistic customer view across channels, simplify customer engagement and solve complex business problems. For more information, visit www.hybris.com.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 355,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.