Founded in 2009, Signavio helps companies design, implement, analyze, and manage complex processes, decisions, and workflows. Signavio's Business Process Intelligence Suite includes a centralized collaborative hub and three core product offerings: Signavio Process Manager, Signavio Workflow Accelerator, and Signavio Process Intelligence.
Now, SAP has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the German SaaS-based business process analysis and decision management software provider. The transaction is expected to close by Q2 2021, subject to antitrust authorities' approvals. Financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed by either party, however, Bloomberg reported that the deal could be worth $1.2 billion.
Signavio's clients currently include Deloitte, Liberty Mutual Insurance, NBCUniversal, and SAP. All of Signavio's founders previously worked at SAP, and the startup is an SAP business partner as the two companies' software platforms can be connected to work together.
Business Process Intelligence is a vital part of SAP's new offering, the ‘RISE with SAP’ package. And the offering helps companies perform a holistic business transformation that makes them resilient, agile, and intelligent. It also includes support for an accelerated move of core ERP processes to the cloud.
Signavio's integrated cloud-native process management suite perfectly complements existing business process intelligence software from SAP. And with the addition of Signavio, SAP can now provide a holistic suite of flexible transformation solutions for customers to transform their business processes end to end.
SAP may see Signavio as a vital missing piece in its business process intelligence unit. "The combination of business process intelligence from SAP and Signavio creates a leading end-to-end business process transformation suite to help our customers achieve the requirements needed to gain a competitive edge," SAP CFO Luka Mucic said in a statement.
However, experts and analysts suggest that SAP might be acquiring the wrong company to achieve this. In process mining, the world market leader is actually Celonis, which has locations throughout the world, including New York City and Tokyo. However, SAP’s acquisition choice likely came down to familiarity given the close ties between the two companies and will nevertheless further SAP’s expansion into this area.
