SAP announced its imminent acquisition of Boston startup SeeWhy in an attempt to rival the likes of Salesforce.com and Oracle with targeted marketing.
The German enterprise resource planning (ERP) giant hopes to boost customer engagement with the deal for the behavioural marketing firm, which uses individual customer data to create personalised ad campaigns.
SeeWhy’s CORE platform uses real-time in-memory processing to churn through 20 billion customer interactions on more than 4,000 e-commerce sites throughout the world.
The startup said in a blog post: "In recent months, our technology has become strategically important to marketers as the explosion of data sources meets a desire to move away from bulk campaigns that risk annoying customers with irrelevant noise.
"The plan is to expand the team aggressively and grow the business. This is good news for both customers and partners alike as SeeWhy will have more resources and the security of being part of one of the largest software companies in the world, while keeping the autonomy to execute and innovate."
SeeWhy claims its services deliver among the highest returns on investment in ecommerce, recovering more than $500m annually in lost sales for many of the world’s leading companies.
It appears that SAP will use SeeWhy to build on last year’s deal for e-commerce platform Hybris, as part of a plan to strengthen its enterprise commerce offerings.
A joint statement from Hybris CEO Ariel Lüdi, andco-founder Carsten Thoma, read: "SeeWhy’s solutions for automating personalised campaigns in real time are a natural fit with hybris and SAP and promise even higher returns for our customers’ investments in the hybris omni-commerce platform."
