SAP AG will acquire KXEN, a leading provider of predictive analytics technology for line-of-business users and analysts. The addition of KXEN promises powerful and easy-to-use predictive capabilities for the extensive customer base of industry-leading cloud and on-premise solutions from SAP.
The combination of KXEN with the advanced analytics, agile visualization, and enterprise business intelligence capabilities from SAP, along with the SAP HANA® platform, is intended to help companies harness Big Data, engage users across the enterprise, and aims to execute before their competitors to gain advantages.
KXEN will complement existing advanced analytics from SAP, including SAP® Predictive Analysis software, a workbench for defining, executing and visualizing predictive analysis. The predictive technology can be used to enhance the value of core SAP applications for managing operations, customer relationships, supply chains, risk, and fraud.
Shekhar Iyer, SAP GVP and GM Analytics & BI, said during a conference call on Friday that the acquisition is a “tremendous opportunity” because KXEN perfectly complements “what we have already” and allows SAP to leverage advanced analytics.
“This was kind of a sweet spot that combines with what we’re bringing to the marketplace with predictive analytic with use of our real-time platform,” Iyer said. “We feel it’s a great acquisition. It’s a great fit for what we have.”
Iyer said the rationale for the acquisition was the customers’ desire for a much more compressed lifecycle.
“This will help us provide tremendous value to our customer base,” Iyer said. “It will be part of our overall predictive analytics team. KXEN has the ability to integrate with the Salesforce application and any other cloud offering. We believe the real-time platform HANA provides is a great platform for KXEN and what it can bring to the table. We will open this up to our partner community so they can leverage this and build other custom applications so it is relevant.”
SAP plans to incorporate KXEN technology into cloud and on-premise SAP applications built on SAP HANA, including the SAP® Fraud Management analytic application, SAP® Smart Meter Analytics software and the SAP® 360 Customer solution. This is aiming to help customers use predictive analytics and data mining to make better decisions on petabytes of Big Data. The acquisition is expected to allow SAP to introduce new predictive capabilities to the portfolio of solutions for more than 25 industries, particularly data-intensive vertical industries such as telecommunications, retail, consumer products, manufacturing, and financial services.
“We want to give a more packaged solution in a use case area,” Iyer said.
Based in San Francisco and major operating locations in Paris and London, KXEN provides predictive analytic tools and applications that automate the end-to-end modeling process, helping to deliver highly accurate and robust predictive models. Its solutions replace the classic model creation process, which is manual, repetitive and prone to human errors. KXEN’s flagship product, InfiniteInsight® , is able to deliver orders of magnitude improvements in speed and agility to optimize steps in the customer life cycle- including acquisition, cross-sell, up-sell, recommendation, retention and next-best activity, as well as across the business for risk, fraud and operations.
SAP expects the transaction to close in the fourth quarter of 2013.