SAP renames Emarsys SAP Engagement Cloud

SAP rebranded its Emarsys survey and feedback tool as SAP Engagement Cloud. With that change also comes an "enterprise edition" that includes additional admin and governance tools.

The move closes the book on SAP's long quest to modernize its suite of employee and customer engagement tools built for the AI era, which began in 2018 with the acquisition of Qualtrics for $8 billion, which it spun off in 2020 with an IPO and ultimately sold its ownership stake in 2023 for $7.7 billion.

SAP acquired Emarsys in 2020 for its personalization tools, journey mapping, feedback gathering and analytics it can derive from that data, and for its platform integration that can trigger actions across SMS, email, web and emerging channels. Before SAP's acquisition, Emarsys focused on customer engagement and loyalty; SAP has since expanded that to include employee experience as well.

Integrating Emarsys more fully into the SAP cloud platform also aligns it with the company's other CX applications, said Liz Miller, analyst at Constellation Research.

"This falls in line with what they've been doing with other pieces of their customer experience portfolio," Miller said. "They've had to really rebuild the platform from the ground up, so that it is a fully composable architecture and it can actually be used across an enterprise -- especially if that enterprise is working on SAP."

Bringing SAP Engagement Cloud deeper into the platform makes crucial processes, such as AI governance, easier, said Joanna Milliken, head of SAP Engagement Cloud. Customers will be able to "naturalize" AI throughout their engagement workflows and embed, for example, supply chain data more smoothly into customer conversations.

"This is how SAP is elevating engagement to be more of an enterprise core capability, connecting that end-to-end experience [instead of] just a traditional marketing stack that kind of sits over here," Milliken said. "So I think it's really helping instantiate that bigger vision of what it can really bring to the table."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.