Yesterday SAP announced its intention to acquire OutlookSoft Corporation, a privately held provider of integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation software.

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.

"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."

Enterprise AntiMatter Comments - "Microsoft Office is the basis for its user interface, which ties in closely to SAP's Duet strategy. And the CPM focus of OutlookSoft promises to tie in closely with SAP's GRC initiative, which is making impressive inroads into both the installed base and, even more importantly, with non-SAP customers as well. Which furthers the synergy that OutlookSoft brings to the table: of its 700 existing customers, 75% are non-SAP customers, which was another part of the story that appealed directly to SAP.

SAP now has three key products to fill out its CPM strategy: strategy management is covered via the Pilot acquisition, profitability management is covered via a reseller agreement with Acorn. And now planning and consolidation have been covered by OutlookSoft. SAP will have its own integration challenges, though I believe they will be much simpler to surmount than Oracle's integration requirements vis-à-vis Hyperion.

Source: 1, 2

Prashanth Rai