All companies with professional investors are always for sale. That’s doubly true once they file to list their shares publicly. The world can see all their secrets, and they market themselves heavily to prospective new investors.
It’s the perfect time for an acquirer to swoop in, which is what SAP did Sunday with its $8 billion acquisition of survey software company Qualtrics. It’s an astounding price for a company with annual revenues just shy of $300 million. In Qualtrics, though, SAP (SAP, -6.11%) is adding to its arsenal of applications makers built primarily to deliver their wares online, compared with the old-fashioned way of shipping their software in packages. Like rival Oracle (ORCL, -1.30%), SAP has been busy using its cash flow to add onto its core business software offering.
