SAP AG has acquired retail software firm Khimetrics Inc.
The financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed but SAP has announced that it expects the deal to close in January 2006. Officials at Walldorf, Germany-based SAP have also revealed that the company will hire all of Khimetrics’ 130 employees and retain the company’s headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Khimetrics boasts that its sales spiked more than 1,500% since 2001 and that it has been cited as one of Inc Magazine’s 500 fastest-growing private companies in the US for the last two years.
Earlier this year SAP lost out in a fierce bidding war to arch-rival Oracle for control of Minneapolis-based Retek, which was one of the biggest retail software vendors.
Undaunted, SAP has worked hard in 2005 to expand its market position in the retail software industry through solutions development and acquisition. It recently bought Triversity, a Canadian maker of point-of-sale software used by grocery, drug and convenience stores to process customers’ transactions.
Following up on its $631 million purchase of Retek in March, Oracle has also been busily bulking up its retail software portfolio. Last summer it snapped up ProfitLogic, which develops software for analyzing customer demand patters in retail environments.
Khimetrics’ Java-based technology is likely to be absorbed into the rapidly evolving SAP for Retail in-store solutions suite, beefing up price optimization and demand intelligence capabilities.
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The technology will also ripple over into SAP’s Financial Services and Consumer product portfolios – for setting pricing and rates and category performance management. Both of these markets are currently supported by Khimetrics’ solutions.
