SAP to acquire ERP support firm datango AG

SAP announced plans on Monday to acquire datango AG, which owns software that supports the rollout of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

The value of the acquisition was not disclosed, but SAP said the transaction is scheduled to close in the next few months.

The datango software helps customers rolling out large-scale business applications with classroom training presentations, e-learning materials and online help. The education software is translated into more than 40 languages.

"In a nutshell, the datango AG software will help our customers train their end users on new software applications and help them keep skills high throughout the entire application lifecycle," said Jan-Gerd Meyer, SAP global head of courseware development, training system development and delivery services, in an interview with V3.

"For example, if a company is implementing a new sales order process, the tool will capture every part of the new process and then provide end users with education materials, such as a Word document describing how to do sales orders using the new process, a training manual as a PowerPoint presentation, a film simulation that will walk the user through the new process, as well as tests they can do to check their performance."

Meyer added that SAP would launch the datango AG software as a standalone product and that it could still provide user support to competitive applications, such as those belonging to Oracle and Microsoft.

"We know that performance management is a critical success factor for our customers," he said.

Since SAP launched Business ByDesign, software from datango AG has been used to help small and medium-sized customers of the suite.

Datango AG sold its product to SAP customers as the Datango Performance Suite, but this name will now be changed to the SAP Workforce Performance Builder.

Last week, SAP reported strong fourth quarter sales, with a total revenue of €4.50bn (£3.72bn), up 11 per cent from the € 4.06bn (£3.36bn) earned during the same period last year.

SAP said growth was due to its core applications business, strong momentum for analytics and mobile solutions and accelerated growth for its big data analytics software, SAP HANA.