SAP has announced an acquisition to strengthen its hybris e-commerce division. It has acquired Gigya, a firm that helps online properties manage customer identities and profiles. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed officially, but reports suggest it is for $350 million.
Gigya today manages some 1.3 billion customer identities across hundreds of sites, existing business that it will bring under SAP’s umbrella. The idea will be to integrate those features into SAP’s wider e-commerce operation to expand the kinds of services it offers to existing customers, and to help sell more e-commerce services to Gigya’s base.
“Gigya brings a wealth of skills and expertise that will significantly enhance the SAP Hybris Profile solution and allow us to take leadership of the emerging customer identity and access management market,” said Carsten Thoma, president and cofounder of SAP Hybris, in a statement. “Consumer trust is the main currency to succeed for customer-driven organizations. This is what Gigya is known and recognized for.”
Gigya originally had its start as a “social” log-in platform in which it helped online properties manage customer profiles as linked with their profiles on sites like Facebook. But a few years ago, the company started to widen out its view of the purpose of identity management and how it can be used for a wider set of customer management features for e-commerce and other sites.
