SAP deepens partnership with Icertis, taking a stake in CLM specialist

SAP announced today that it is building on its partnership with CLM specialist Icertis that began in 2020. They will create a joint roadmap, SAP said in a news release.

Walldorf, Germany-based SAP has taken a minority stake in US- and India-based Icertis as part of the deal. SAP also announced the elevation of its Icertis integration to an Endorsed App for SAP Ariba, a status that designates solutions that are intended to complement and enhance existing SAP solutions. Icertis is also now an Endorsed App for SAP Customer Experience solutions.

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The deepening partnership between SAP and Icertis represents more than a technical marriage of the two vendors. Increasingly, both firms will go to market together, marketing and selling their solutions together. And notably, Icertis CLM is now the only enterprise CLM vendor in the SAP App Store to claim Endorsed status, signaling a level of commitment by SAP only underscored by its new minority stake in Icertis, a rapidly growing CLM platform valued at $5 billion, according to a 2021 report by Bloomberg.

Christian Klein, SAP’s CEO and member of the Executive Board, said in the release that “the expanded cooperation with Icertis will help our customers take advantage of market-leading innovations for contract management from Icertis while managing core business processes with SAP solutions. This partnership is a great complement to our portfolio, with multiple touchpoints to SAP systems across ERP, finance, procurement, sales and HR.”

Icertis CEO Samir Bodas said the partnership will allow the vendors’ customers to ensure that “the intent of every contract is correctly memorialized and fully realized” to get end-to-end value across the enterprises.

“Partnering with SAP to bring our AI-powered, best-of-breed contract intelligence to the market is another affirmation of Icertis’ strategy to become the contract intelligence platform of the world,” Bodas said in the release. “It is also a testament to SAP’s forward-looking vision for the intelligent and networked enterprise.”

Both vendors participate in Spend Matters SolutionMap ranking of providers. The SAP Ariba solution competes in the Source-to-Pay suite categories, and SAP Fieldglass is ranked in the Vendor Management System category, which includes support for statement of work (SOW)-related services agreement management.

In SolutionMap, Icertis is a Value Leader among the competing CLM vendors, meaning that it has high scores for its technology and its customer feedback results. When serving enterprise clients, Icertis has the top scores for its technical capabilities, according to the SolutionMap persona for the Large market requirements.

Both companies made the 2021 Spend Matters “50 Procurement Providers to Know” list, which is compiled by the entire Spend Matters analyst team to represent the best of the commercial providers that serve enterprise-level procurement organizations.

In past Spend Matters PRO coverage, our analysts noted that from a strategic partnership/M&A perspective, “in our view, SAP needs Icertis the most [relative to other larger vendors] and could leverage it as a key value-expanding element to S/4HANA.”

Look for analyst coverage of this SAP-Icertis deal and what it means for the CLM market. A post for our PRO subscribers is coming soon.

We have covered both vendors for years. For a CLM focus, see our past PRO analyst coverage here:

SAP deepens partnership with Icertis, taking minority stake and committing to joint roadmap with the CLM specialist

FEATURED COMPANY

Icertis

FEATURED COMPANY

SAP