Mergers & Acquisitions Archives - Page 3 Of 4

SAP Accelerates Experience Pivot with a $8 billion Bet on Qualtrics | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

November 14, 2018

Just days before 16-year old Qualtrics was due to launch its IPO, SAP announced its acquisition of the customer experience management company in an attempt to bolster its CRM portfolio. Qualtrics, one of the most anticipated tech IPOs of the year, and oversubscribed 13 times due to investor demand, adds to SAP’s arsenal of cloud-based software vendor acquisitions.

Delving into SAP’s Strategic Intent

Seeking transformational opportunities, the acquisition will allow SAP to sit atop the experience economy through the leverage of “X-data” (experience data) and “O-data” (operational data). Moreover, the acquisition will enable SAP to cash in on a rather untapped area that brings together customer, employee, product, and brand feedback to deliver a holistic and seamless customer experience.

SAP had multiple reasons to acquire Qualtrics:

First, it combines Qualtrics’ experience data collection system with SAP’s expertise in slicing and dicing operational data
Second, it sits conveniently within SAP’s overarching strategy to push C/4 HANA, its cloud-based sales and marketing suite.

SAP’s acquisition history makes it clear it seeks to achieve transformative growth by bolting in capabilities from the companies it acquires. It has garnered a fine reputation when it comes to onboarding acquired companies and realizing increasing gains out of the existing mutual synergies. Its unrelenting focuses on product portfolio/roadmap alignment, cultural integration, and GTM with acquired companies have been commendable.

Here is a look at its past cloud-based software company acquisitions:

SAP has taken a debt to finance the Qualtrics acquisition, making it imperative to show business gains from the move. With Qualtrics on board, it seems SAP’s ambitious cloud growth target (€8.2-8.7 billion by 2020) will receive a shot in the arm. However, the acquisition is expected to close by H1 2019, implying that the investors will have to wait to see returns. Moreover, SAP’s stock price in the past 12 months has dropped by 10.6 percent versus the S&P 500 Index rise of 3.4 percent. While SAP has seen revenue growth, its bottom-line results have been disappointing with a contraction in operating margins (cloud revenues have grown but tend to have a lower margin profile in the beginning.) This is likely to be further exacerbated given the enterprise multiple for this deal.

Fighting the Age-old Enterprise Challenge

Having said that, SAP sits in a solid location to win the war against the age-old enterprise conundrum of integrating back-, middle-, and front-office operations and recognize the operational linkages between the functions. Qualtrics’ experience management platform, known for its predictive modeling capabilities, generating real-time insights, and decentralizing the decision-making process, will certainly augment SAP’s value proposition and messaging for its C/4 HANA sales and marketing cloud. In fact, the mutual synergies between the two companies might put SAP at an equal footing with Salesforce in the CRM space.

While it may seem that SAP has arrived a bit early to the party, given that customer experience management is still a niche area, the market’s expected growth rate and SAP’s timely acquisition decision may allow it to leap-frog IBM and CA Technologies (now acquired by Broadcom), the current leaders in the space. Indeed, over the last couple of years, Qualtrics has pivoted beyond survey and other banal customer sentiment analysis methods to create a SaaS suite capable of:

Analyzing experience data to derive insights about employees, business partners, and end-customers
Democratizing and unifying analytics across the back-, middle-, and front-office operations
Delivering more proactive and predictive insights to alleviate experience inadequacy.

Cognitive Meets Customer Experience Management – The Road Ahead

SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise strategic tenet, enabled by its intelligent cloud suite (S/4 HANA, Fiori), digital platform (SAP HANA, SAP Data Hub, SAP Cloud Platform), and intelligent systems (SAP Leonardo, SAP Analytics Cloud), has allowed customers to embed cutting edge technologies – conversational AI, ML foundation, and cloud platform for blockchain. SAP is already working towards the combination of machine learning and natural language query (NLQ) technology to augment human intelligence, with a vision to drive business agility. Embedding the experience management suite within next-generation Intelligent Enterprise tenet will play a key role in achieving the exponential growth targets by 2020.

Please share your thoughts on this acquisition with us at: [email protected] and [email protected].

Acquisition Of Red Hat Repositions IBM For Digital IT Modernization | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

October 30, 2018

IBM’s $34 billion cash acquisition of Red Hat announced early this week has far-reaching implications for the IT services world. IT is modernizing, moving from a legacy world with data centers, proprietary operating systems and proprietary technologies to a digital environment with cloud, open-source software, a high degree of automation, DevOps and integration among these components. IBM’s legacy assets and capabilities are formidable, but the firm was not well positioned for IT modernization and struggled with digital operating models. The Red Hat acquisition is significant as it repositions IBM as a vital, must-have partner for enterprise customers in IT modernization and evolving digital operating models. This is a very intriguing acquisition for IBM. Let’s look at the implications for IBM and enterprise customers.

Services Prediction: More Mega Deals Coming | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

October 24, 2018

An interesting trend is developing in the services industry, reversing the trend we’ve seen for the past five years. I predict that this year, and for the next few years, we will see a modest rise in mega deals – deals with $500,000,000 or more in Total Contract Value (TCV). Where are those deals coming from?

At Everest Group, we watch services transactions closely. Over the last five years, the industry experienced a big move away from mega deals, preferring smaller and smaller transactions. This was then exacerbated by digital rotation where customers were interested in digital pilots – which are small deals. But this year we note a renewal of interest – in some specific situations – for large deals.

Here’s my take on three forces driving mega deals now.

Force #1: IP-Plus-Services Model

One force driving mega deals is where the service provider wraps services around the intellectual property (IP) platform the provider owns. TCS’s book of business of large deals is a good example of this. TCS has an IP platform around insurance and mega deals tied to that platform. The $2 billion-plus TCS transaction with Transamerica earlier this year is a good example. What makes the deal so large? The customer is modernizing its IT by jettisoning its legacy technology and transferring it to TCS for modernization through the TCS platform.

As the services industry pivots to digital models, IP ownership plays an increasingly important role. Automating work diminishes the importance of labor arbitrage, and the profit pool reconfigures around IP owners. The nature of the IP-plus-services model allows mega deals to happen. I expect more of this kind of deal to happen at TCS as well as at providers like Cognizant, which has a similar platform in the pharmaceutical healthcare space with TriZetto. Both TCS and Cognizant are using their investments in IP platforms to differentiate their offerings and capture large contracts.

Where service providers own important IP platforms, I see those as the basis for some very large deals.

Force #2: Leveraging the Balance Sheet

Another source for large deals is providers leveraging their balance sheet to finance a customer’s large-scale IT modernization. HCL and Wipro are good examples of providers using this approach to create very large deals. They use their balance sheets to fund expensive IT modernization deals, including taking over a customer’s legacy assets. This strategy accelerates a service provider’s growth, and I expect to see more mega deals using this strategy.

Force #3: Digital Transformation Programs

This year, we’ve seen digital transformation move out of the pilot phase into full-blown transformation programs. The amount of money customers spend on these transformations is staggering, often hundreds of millions of dollars. The large availability of enterprise funding for transformation is likely to encourage larger deals.

The net result of these three forces? I believe we will see a modest increase in mega deals, and in certain areas, larger deals for the remainder of this year and next year.

I’m not claiming the entire services market is moving to mega deals. In fact, two size-diminishing secular trends that were well underway continue: (1) decomposing the legacy, multi-tower deals to single towers and bidding those out (2) the move from managed services to systems integration and digital work. These trends will continue to create a fabric of smaller transactions.

However, some large deals are emerging. I believe the three forces I described are working against the well-established trends for smaller deals we saw during the last five years.

The Digital Health Unicorns Are Proving Their Value | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

February 23, 2018

In August 2016, Everest Group published an analysis of hot digital health startups that were disrupting the status quo of the industry landscape. It ended becoming a unicorn-spotting analysis…cut to February 2018, and by healthcare and life sciences organizations have acquired three — Flatiron Health, NantHealth, Practice Fusion — and among the top 25 players. While we speak, there are multiple conversations around the others as investor interest peaks.

What are the key business reasons behind these three acquisitions?

Flatiron Health by Roche: Flatiron Health has an end-to-end cloud-based EHR platform (OncoEMR) exclusive for oncology that curates the evidence-based drug development process. As oncology is one of Roche’s major focus areas, this is extremely valuable for the company while devising cancer drugs. No wonder Roche agreed to a US$1.9 billion acquisition price, in addition to its existing stake in the company. Flatiron Health also has a OncoAnalytics module that leverages big data analytics for better diagnosis and treatment.
NantHealth by Allscripts: NantHealth is a cloud-based healthcare firm that aims to improve patient outcomes and personalized treatment. Its proprietary learning system, CLINICS, utilizes machine learning and cognitive computing to provide information for better care delivery, tools and insights for efficient care financing, and wellness management programs for enhanced patient engagement. NantHealth fits well within Allscripts’ ambitious plan to build a healthcare company that drives innovation in patient care and improves evidence-based research in R&D processes.
Practice Fusion by Allscripts: Practice Fusion is a web-based cloud EHR platform that also provides patient engagement and practice management assistance. Unlike traditional EHR platforms, Practice Fusion provides a simple and intuitive user interface. Beyond these capabilities, this acquisition also adds ~30,000 ambulatory sites to Allscripts’ client base in the hard-to-crack independent physician practices segment.

What’s working with these healthcare startup acquisitions

Here’s what is common among these recent acquisitions:

Data is the new oil: The real asset is access to critical healthcare data. Companies that convert the data into actionable insights, resulting in better patient care, emerge as clear winners.
Uberization of everything: Healthcare enterprises have struggled with huge fixed investments in EHR platforms, on-premise infrastructure, etc. This has created a deep dent in their profitability numbers. Because Flatiron Health, NantHealth, and PracticeFusion and are cloud-based companies, there are no more fixed costs, everything is demand-based. Clearly, the as-a-service model has become the choice for healthcare firms.
Care – of, by, and for the people: Accelerated R&D cycles, augmented physician capabilities, and improved precision in diagnosis and treatment all ultimately result in improved patient care, enhanced clinical outcomes, and boosted patient engagement. All three of these acquired companies focus on improving at least one of those factors. And they all allow the acquiring companies’ patients to take center stage.

Digital moves from pilot to program

At a broader industry level, these acquisitions mirror the change in sentiment around digital initiatives. Our research shows signs that enterprises are moving beyond proof of concept to proof of value. While digital, as a market, lends itself to smaller deals with focuses on design thinking, first principles problem solving, and business model redesign, we see these initiatives now scaling up.

As the digital marketplace matures, investment activity is only going to intensify. While early adopters are reaping rich rewards, valuations and competition for viable targets are likely to skyrocket. It’s clear that healthcare enterprises see significant business value, and are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Stay tuned to this space for more analysis of what’s happening in the healthcare and digital spaces.

Office Depot Acquires CompuCom in an Amazon–Driven Pivot | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

October 9, 2017

The adage, “Disruption does not discriminate,” rang true again with Office Depot’s acquisition of CompuCom last week.

The beleaguered office supplies retailer bought the IT infrastructure firm for US$ 1 billion, illustrating yet again the disruptive impact of Amazon and the digital economy. With this deal, Office Depot expects to add US$1.1 billion in revenue, and achieve cost synergies to the tune of US$40 million in two years. As part of the transaction, Thomas H. Lee Partners LP, the PE firm that owns CompuCom, will assume an 8 percent ownership in Office Depot.

The why

The deal comes at a time when Office Depot’s business is in the doldrums due to diminishing demand for traditional office supplies as offices go digital and online retailers eat into brick and mortar sales. CompuCom had its own share of problems, with four CEOs in the past four years, declining revenue, and diminishing investor confidence.

As the proposed takeover by Staples fell at the antitrust altar last year, Office Depot had been looking for ways to strengthen sales that had continued to slacken for several quarters. Its hiring of a slew of tech executives indicated that a drastic change was in the cards.

With this acquisition, Office Depot aims to pivot towards a business services and technology play in order to achieve:

Superior value proposition: Provide a stronger story to customers around the “workplace ecosystem” for enterprises
Cross-sell opportunities
- Leverage its “Last Mile” footprint to provide Tech-Zone help desks in Office Depot’s 1,400 retail locations, thus increasing CompuCom’s service-based opportunities
- Use the Tech-Zone help desks to increase on-premise traffic, thus driving traditional sales
Topline growth from recurring revenue streams
Synergies around the SMB market: Both companies target this highly fragmented market, with Office Depot’s omni-channel strategy offering access to nearly 6 million SMBs.

So, all ends well…right?

While the CompuCom acquisition is in line with the “Software Eats Everything” theme, meaningful questions exist:

Uninspiring investor confidence: Office Depot’s share price dropped by 15 percent following the announcement. Although this can be considered a short-term consequence, both firms have struggled as secular market trends reshape their core industries. Will the combined entity realize its promised value?
Digital innovation: There is little clarity on the combined entity’s innovation strategy around the digital workplace construct. The onus is on it, especially CompuCom, to deliver a value proposition centered on seamless customer experience
The Amazon conundrum: With Amazon disrupting traditional business models – via e-channels and innovation across physical channels through concepts such as Amazon Go – the combined entity must chalk out a strategy to counter Amazon’s onslaught from both the retail and technology perspectives
Change management: The combined entity needs to guard itself against organizational inertia, as the pivot from a brick and mortar model to a services play will require considerable structural changes and incentive restructuring
Customer education: The combined entity must educate customers about its new value proposition and what it means for their business and their business as usual to assuage any concerns that lead to customer flight.

The way forward

There have been previous instances of retailers acquiring Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to enhance their value proposition and margins. This includes Staples’ acquisition of Thrive Networks in 2007, and Best Buy’s acquisition of mindSHIFT in 2011. Although worthy pursuits, these acquisitions failed due to executional fallacies, lack of a clear-cut strategy, and their erroneous belief that SMBs would choose them to outsource their IT in a managed services model.

On the other hand, most of CompuCom’s revenue comes from conventional project-based and procurement engagements. The customer experience point is important here. If Office Depot can make this model a de facto choice for customers looking for a better customer experience, this might just work.

That said, the continuous disruption by players such as Amazon and the proliferation of digital users who demand a personalized user experience across all channels will play a key role in determining the success of this acquisition.

Creating a definitive digital value proposition aligned to customer expectations and chalking out a clear, dynamic execution strategy are the key tenets Office Depot must embrace for the CompuCom acquisition to succeed. Indeed, they are our words to the wise for any service-related organizations considering M&A activity in today’s digitally-disrupted environment.

What is your take on Office Depot’s pivot? We would love to hear from you at [email protected] and [email protected]

Is Infosys Stepping Up Its Acquisition Game? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

August 4, 2017

The disruptive turmoil of the digital revolution is felt in all corners of the world, particularly among India’s service providers. In several blogs, I’ve discussed the differing tactics third-party IT and business service providers are using to address the steep challenges in the changing market. The steps they’re taking to clamp down on the shift to digital services can affect your company’s decision around third-party services. Infosys’ announcement this week of its agreement to acquire Brilliant Basics illustrates it’s on the way to turning vision into reality.

CEO Vishal Sikka joined Infosys with a mandate to transform the company and implement a “digital first” strategy. Two big areas of change in this transformation are acquiring new talent and rethinking assumptions embedded in the organizational culture. New digital business models require that a service provider’s talent base have digital expertise. In an earlier blog, I pointed out Infosys would need to acquire companies that have already developed a digital business and have a digital talent base.

Game on in P&C Insurance! Genpact Acquires BrightClaim | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

May 5, 2017

Challenging macroeconomic conditions, demanding digitally-savvy consumers, and rising fraud are pushing P&C insurance carriers to be more demanding than ever of their service providers. Carriers not only expect optimization of cost of insurance operations, but also assistance in gaining and retaining market and customer mind share. This is forcing service providers’ hand to move from an arbitrage-first to a digital-first model.

Meanwhile, insurance BPO service providers’ origins in the arbitrage-first world and their strategic choices in large P&C product categories, such as personal lines, worked well for a while. But with the U.S. and U.K. markets maturing, service providers are being forced to reconsider their strategy. They now not only need to focus on the customer experience, their digital footprint, and lowering TCO, but also on developing deeper domain expertise to drive growth and remain differentiated in the market.

As we talked about in our report, “Property and Casualty Insurance BPO – Annual Report 2016: The Dawn of Transformational Era – Adapt and Evolve to Succeed,” this leaves them with three options to avoid falling into the no-growth trap:

Develop capabilities in judgment-intensive processes (i.e., trod the path taken by Third-Party Administrators, or TPAs)
Take the plunge to develop capabilities for handling more “exotic” P&C product categories (such as insurance of dump trucks!)
Explore under-penetrated (emerging) markets

Genpact (a Leader on Everest Group’s P&C insurance BPO PEAK Matrix-2017) clearly decided to pull the trigger on this conundrum, announcing on 3 May that it had acquired BrightClaim. BrightClaim’s suite of services includes property claims management (including catastrophe claims), claims adjusting, TPA services, and contents pricing services.

With this acquisition, Genpact has gained deeper domain expertise in U.S. P&C insurance claims market, and has strengthened its portfolio of digital technologies and fraud detection capabilities.

The acquisition also includes National Vendor, a BrightClaim associated company, which has a nationwide network of contractors and offers carriers a direct repair program along with content fulfillment. Genpact can leverage this to provide cost-effective and faster claims settlement services, which is expected not only to reduce claims payouts for insurers, but also to improve the customer experience.

Genpact’s top competitors in the U.S. P&C market are Cognizant and EXL. With both of them continuing to augment their capabilities and developing deep domain expertise, it was imperative for Genpact to make a move. As a favorable by-product of this acquisition, Genpact has further strengthened its onshore delivery capability with centers in Atlanta, GA and Austin, TX.

Prima facie, the deal looks accretive and has the potential to enable Genpact to challenge other Leaders in P&C insurance BPO space.

How will other providers in this segment respond? Game on! We’d say….

Accenture’s Eye-catching Acquisition of Genfour | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

April 7, 2017

It’s a safe bet that most enterprises as well as service providers pay attention to Accenture’s market moves and investments. After all, Accenture is the world’s largest independent consulting and IT outsourcing firm, so who wouldn’t think it wise to learn by observing the firm’s strategies? Let’s look at Accenture’s recent acquisition of Genfour. Interestingly, the two major considerations that typically drive acquisitions are not at play in this case; so, what is Accenture’s strategy?

Based in the U.K, Genfour has fewer than 200 employees. It’s tiny compared to Accenture, which has 401,000 employees and 6,600 leaders. So, the acquisition won’t have any material impact on Accenture’s revenues. And the acquisition will add mostly mid-size enterprises to Accenture’s client base.

Why Did Deloitte Acquire Day1 Solutions? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

April 6, 2017

Deloitte recently announced it acquired cloud consulting firm Day1 Solutions. Deloitte is one of the world’s largest service providers and has service relationships with most major U.S. enterprises. Day1 is a small firm. So, this raises the question: Why does Deloitte need Day1? And why should your enterprise care?

Deloitte needs Day1 for the same reason Accenture needs Genfour, Genpact needs Rage Frameworks and Infosys needs Panaya. The problem for Deloitte and for every traditional services company is that their clients do not believe they have the digital skills to lead the digital transformation journey the clients want their business to undertake.

Accenture’s Acquisition of Genfour is Harbinger of More M&A to Come | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

April 4, 2017

Accenture announced today that it has acquired Genfour, the pureplay automation integration and professional services company, for an undisclosed amount. Everest Group research indicates that Genfour is growing fast more than doubling revenue year on year but that is the norm in a growth market that is currently dominated by RPA technologies. Revenue mix includes annuity, run and operate as well as consultancy. The company head count includes a large developer pool. Genfour has a strong presence in the insurance and utilities sectors, as well as a few clients located in the US.

Acquisition of additional automation skills likely a key driver

Genfour works with a number of Service Delivery Automation (SDA) technologies, Blue Prism, UiPath, and Celaton. It also has its own Genfour Autonomic platform with multi-tenant features and interfaces to third party workflow and reporting software. It not only develops and deploys automation for clients but offers on-going as-a-service operation and support services.

Automation skills are in short supply in the market, and Genfour brings Accenture expert personnel. This is likely to be the main reason for the acquisition.

Client acquisition is unlikely to have been a driver for this take over given that many of Genfour’s clients are mid-sized organizations that are not usually targeted by Accenture. However, Genfour’s presence in the insurance sector might have helped.

In terms of technology, the two companies’ capabilities mostly complement each other. Accenture has built extensive automation capabilities in recent years by following a strategy of partnering with leading automation technology vendors, Blue Prism and IPsoft among them. While the two companies share expertise in Blue prism, and to some extent, UiPath, Genfour adds Celaton and its own IP to the Accenture mix.

Expect the M&A trend to continue

The market is moving towards increasing levels of domain and industry specific automation. Accenture is likely to follow this trend and build capabilities for specific domains and vertical expertise as well as increasingly more complex projects.

It is unsurprising that there is M&A activity in this market. We have predicted this, and there is more to come. This acquisition is unlikely to be the last in SDA in 2017.
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Category: Mergers & Acquisitions