Toronto, Canada-based Triversity claims to be the fastest growing international provider of customer-centric retail software with more than 250 customers in 32 countries. But it is the privately held company’s strength in the North American market that lured SAP, which sees the retail industry as a growth opportunity in an increasingly saturated marketplace as retailers move away from in-house software development in favor of standard software.
Earlier this year, SAP boosted its retail software portfolio with the $496m cash acquisition of US retail software specialist Retek, which gave it a suite of management applications to support merchandising operations, inventory and supply chain management, and multichannel retailing.
Triversity’s software includes traditional and enterprise point-of-sale, store inventory management, POS loss prevention, customer loyalty, stored value, store back-office, and in-store and multi-channel customer service. SAP said the software is complementary to SAP’s existing retail software and the two companies have several joint customers.
SAP America CEO Bill McDermott said the Triversity deal is in line with its strategy of acquiring companies to enhance product functionality within key industry verticals. He said it would enable SAP to offer customers an end-to-end retail offering, connecting data from initial consumer interactions at the point of sale, through the retail supply chain to the enterprise back office.
SAP claims a customer base of 2,700 retailers, though only 400 are using industry-specific applications from the SAP for Retail portfolio, suggesting it needs to make it more attractive to its own customers, and the Triversity deal fits in with this strategy.
