SAP Picks Up TechniData for Health, Safety Enterprise Apps

SAP announced it will acquire TechniData AG, a longtime partner and developer of environmental, health and product safety applications, a move designed to help differentiate it from competitors such as IBM and Oracle in the fast-growing industry.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but SAP (NYSE: SAP) officials said they expect the acquisition to be completed and approved by regulators by the beginning of the third quarter.

“Sustainability is about holistically managing economic, environmental and social risks and opportunities,” said Peter Graf, SAP’s chief sustainability officer, in a statement. “IT can help organizations execute their sustainability strategies in a way that drives short- and long-term profitability.”

TechniData, based in Markdorf, Germany has more than 500 employees and recorded annual sales of approximately $87 million and $77.3 million, respectively, in its last two fiscal years.

The acquisition comes less than a week after Oracle ponied up $685 million to acquire Phase Forward, an on-demand provider of drug data management and health science software.

Determined to overtake SAP for the top spot among business applications vendors, Oracle continues to make acquisitions large and small to erode SAP’s market share and take away its bread-and-butter customers with strategic niche purchasesin specific vertical industries.

SAP, which generally eschews the growth-through-acquisition strategy, stepped outside of its comfort zone in 2007 with its enormous $6.7 billion acquisition of Business Objects.

However, it’s largely sat on the sidelines while Oracle continued to gobble up public and privately held software vendors at a staggering pace.

The TechniData purchase fits with SAP’s strategy to position itself as a leader in the nascent sustainability space. In December, it rolled out SAP BusinessObjects Sustainability Management, an application suite that will give enterprise customers the ability to cull through hundreds of business applications and consolidate the data in one dashboard to manage an organization’s overall sustainability program.

“We believe that the scale of SAP’s development and field resources combined with our expertise in the EHS and product safety domains can help us bring the value of sustainability to more customers worldwide,” TechniData CEO Juergen Schwab said in a statement.