SAP to accelerate Cloud Strategy

VARINDIA- INDIA'S FRONTLINE IT MAGAZINE

SAP AG and SuccessFactors have announced that SAP's subsidiary, SAP America, has entered into a definitive merger agreement with SuccessFactors. The acquisition will add SuccessFactors' widely respected team and technology to SAP's powerful cloud assets, significantly accelerating SAP's momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure. The combination of SAP and SuccessFactors will establish an advanced end-to-end offering of cloud and on-premise solutions for managing all relevant business processes.

The SuccessFactors board of directors has unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 52% premium both over the December 2nd closing price and the one month volume weighted average price per share. The transaction will be funded from SAP's cash on hand and a 1 billion Euro term loan facility. The closing of the tender offer is conditioned on SuccessFactors stockholders tendering at least a majority of the outstanding shares of SuccessFactors common stock (on a fully diluted basis) and clearances by relevant regulatory authorities. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012 and be slightly dilutive to SAP's Non-IFRS earnings per share in 2012 and accretive in subsequent years.

"The cloud is a core of SAP's future growth, and the combination of SuccessFactors' leadership team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse. The acquisition will help us address the top priority for CEOs globally - managing people and talent, Together, SAP and SuccessFactors will create tremendous business value for customers, with potent synergies to accelerate our growth in the cloud," said Bill McDermott, Co-CEO, SAP.

"This is a revolutionary combination of proven capabilities that will allow SuccessFactors to accelerate our roadmap by 10 years, and bring the world's leading application knowledge and intellectual property to our customers through the cloud, and the largest applications customer base instantly. Expanding relationships with SAP's 176,000 customers with our speed to value, friendly user interface, on mobile devices and the web, and seamlessly delivering more SAP solutions in the cloud will be legendary, as organizations adopt the cloud to improve their business. SuccessFactors has proven we have the technology and people to deliver the world's biggest cloud deployments in terms of users and countries per customer, and also the most applications per customer from the same flexible scalable cloud platform. The business world is ready for enterprise-class cloud applications and together, we can deliver incredible new innovation for global businesses," said Lars Dalgaard, Founder & CEO, SuccessFactors.

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