05/08/2007

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced its intention to acquire OutlookSoft Corporation, a privately held provider of integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation software.

ebizQ received the following:

Today’s announcement marks another milestone in SAP’s multi-year plan to holistically address the increasingly sophisticated requirements of the CFO around driving business performance, managing risk, ensuring compliance and spearheading financial transformation in their organizations. In making the announcement, SAP stated that the acquisition is expected to be completed in June 2007, pending approval from the respective antitrust authorities. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

CFOs today face increasing pressure to meet regulatory requirements and drive efficiencies while at the same time playing a strategic role in driving the growth and profitability of the business. SAP’s build/partner approach, supplemented by strategic “fill in” acquisitions, has enabled CFOs to benefit from the most comprehensive, integrated set of financial business processes. Building upon the market-leading, cross-industry financial applications suite within SAP ERP, CFOs can ensure business compliance and manage risk with integrated governance, risk and compliance management applications (SAP solutions for GRC) and improve their business performance linking strategy to execution with risk-adjusted planning and corporate performance management (SAP solutions for performance management). The transaction with OutlookSoft is continuing evidence of SAP’s strategy to use well-placed acquisitions to complement its broad solution offering by gaining innovative technologies, while maintaining its successful organic growth track record.

“Across industry segments and global markets, CFOs are under tremendous pressure to improve business performance, predictability and stakeholder confidence,” said Doug Merritt, corporate officer and member of the Executive Council, head of Business User Development, SAP AG. “Leading companies are looking to establish unified, easy-to-use best practice business processes that enable a predictive and risk-adjusted approach to performance. OutlookSoft completes another key component of our multi-year strategy to build, partner and acquire unique offerings for CFOs, a strategy based on thorough market analysis and customer input. OutlookSoft brings the people, intellectual property and expertise that will enhance the SAP business user experience and add value for a strong cross-section of our customer base.”

OutlookSoft Innovation

Recognizing customers’ needs for an innovative new approach to performance management, OutlookSoft was founded in 1999 to deliver the standard for next-generation solutions based on unprecedented ease-of-use for the business user and unified experience across all performance management processes. OutlookSoft focused on this vision by modernizing solutions for the CFO leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to enable collaboration across the enterprise and delivering real-time, predictive analytics capabilities and finance-ready business process flows, an extensible library of procedures guiding business users through all performance management activities and facilitating collaboration.

The company’s vision has been validated by more than 700 customers globally, a record year in 2006 with 25 percent revenue growth and an unprecedented win-rate against its competitors with the latest availability of OutlookSoft 5. OutlookSoft’s singular commitment to the CFO, its deep domain knowledge and its vision for next-generation performance management solutions clearly complements SAP’s core expertise in integrated financial applications and strengthens the company’s strategy to effectively address the increasingly complex requirements of the finance organization.

OutlookSoft’s modern, standards-based solution is built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), thus enabling customers to take advantage of OutlookSoft 5 and extend the value of their SAP solutions by leveraging integration with SAP’s service-enabled applications via a common technology platform, SAP NetWeaver. In particular, SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI), with over 14,000 installations, will provide the robust BI infrastructure powering the OutlookSoft 5 application and deliver a common user experience to the business user.

“From the beginning, OutlookSoft has focused on helping business users, the executive team and, most importantly, the CFO,” said Phil Wilmington, president and CEO, OutlookSoft. “Our solution unifies organizations, disparate systems and processes through innovative technology and accessibility to information. This is an exciting time for our customers and partners, as we combine the business process expertise and technology platform from SAP with the usability and deep functionality of OutlookSoft’s performance management application.”