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SAP Said to Have Held Strategy Talks With Salesforce Last Year 2015-05-01 20:00:37.980 GMT
By Aaron Ricadela and Jack Clark (Bloomberg) -- The chief executive officers of SAP SE and Salesforce.com Inc. held discussions last year about possible strategic alliances between the two companies, people with knowledge of the matter said. The talks also included a potential acquisition of Salesforce by SAP, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations were private. The discussions between Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and SAP CEO Bill McDermott began after Benioff contacted McDermott via telephone before SAP reported quarterly earnings on April 17, 2014, said the person. Chi Hea Cho, a spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Salesforce, declined to comment. Nicola Leske, a spokeswoman for Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, declined to comment. It couldn’t be determined whether there are currently any takeover discussions between the two companies. Salesforce is working with financial advisers to help it field takeover offers after being approached by a potential acquirer, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Salesforce was prompted to work with the financial advisers by a more recent overture from a company other than SAP, another person said. A takeover of Salesforce would be the largest ever for a software company. Acquiring the company would give any buyer a lead in the market for customer relationship management software, and credibility in cloud computing. Safra Catz, co-CEO of Salesforce rival Oracle Corp., said this week that an acquisition of Salesforce by a competitor would be good for Oracle. “It’ll cause a lot of disruption in that market,” she said and declined to comment on whether Oracle was interested in the company. Growth has been slowing in Salesforce’s main customer relationship management business, forcing the company to expand into other verticals such as marketing and analytics via a combination of acquisitions and new products. Oracle, Microsoft Corp. and other rivals have done the same. Salesforce’s revenue rose 32 percent in the fiscal year through January, compared with 33 percent in the prior year, and 35 percent the year before that.
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To contact the reporters on this story: Aaron Ricadela in Frankfurt at +49-69-92041-156 or aricadela@bloomberg.net Jack Clark in San Francisco at +1-415-617-7034 or jclark185@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at +1-415-617-7261 or jward56@bloomberg.net; Kenneth Wong at +49-30-70010-6215 or kwong11@bloomberg.net Reed Stevenson, Tony Robinson