SAP Acquires Wicom Communications

In a move that will enable companies to streamline and improve their customer-facing processes, SAP today announced the acquisition of Wicom Communications, a provider of all-IP contact center and enterprise communications software.

Wicom, which is based in Finland, is a privately held company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Acquiring Wicom will enable SAP to offer companies the ability to better integrate communications technologies and business systems, including customer relationship management and contact center applications.

For Wicom, the acquisition means expanded opportunities for customers to benefit from a unified solution to manage communication-enabled business processes, said Ilkka Kivimaki, Wicom's CEO. "Wicom firmly established itself as an innovator in improving the performance and quality of customer service, telesales and daily business interactions for our growing customer base. Together, SAP and Wicom will support communication-enabled business processes, starting with a complete solution for a multichannel all-IP contact center," he said.

The company's current solution can be deployed using hosted, on-premises, or hybrid deployment model,s and already provides standard Web-based integration to SAP's CRM and Interaction Center applications.

"The market is moving to a more communications-intensive enablement of business processes," notes Bob Stutz, senior vice president and general manager of SAP's CRM Strategy and Product. "With the addition of Wicom Communications, SAP will offer game-changing communication-enabled business processes to organizations to help improve the customer experience, streamline operations and lower TCO."

At the same time, SAP also announced the acquisition of MaXware, a privately held Norwegian IT security services firm. That move will allow SAP to add additional layers of security and identity verification to its NetWeaver application development platform.