Tech moves
SAP announced intent to acquire Qualtrics for $8b. As a frequent user as well as a shareholder of Survey Monkey (SM), naturally my thoughts went to how this news impacts SM. I jumped onto the Survey Monkey’s Q3 earnings conference call to get a better feel.
SM was asked to assess impact of the news. Right off the bat, SM said they don’t want to be the system of record for feedback data, contrasting themselves to Qualtrics. Rather, they want to surface the information in various solutions that enterprises already use such as Salesforce, Tableau, Microsoft Teams, Slack etc. Sounds like a good approach. I’ve always been a fan of enabling people to get more out of popular tools that they already use daily instead of a shoehorn approach.
Naturally, this support for a big ecosystem of solutions that consume SM data means you have to do the work to build those connectors, maintain them, react to changes in those target solutions.
However, one can’t be sure that Qualtrics is also not pursuing an ecosystem play. A quick Google search revealed that they have support for CRM, Tableau etc. The differentiation between a system of record vs not could just be that SM likely doesn’t require that the consumption tools don’t actually require connecting to the SM cloud once the data has been imported.
SM has been a consumer play for awhile but have recently started to go deeper into the enterprise. It’s a good move for them.
I will predict there will be some crossover consolidation between experience/feedback management companies and brand monitoring companies in the near future.
My takeaway is that SM and Qualtrics can look forward to sizable opportunities in this huge addressable market.
