Back in April 2011, SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott was adamant: SAP wouldn’t be making any big acquisitions.

That hard line softened a bit over the summer, and then seemingly melted about the time, in September, when SAP received good news related to the Oracle v. SAP TomorrowNow trial: U.S. District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton tossed out the $1.3 billion verdict against SAP.

During the course of the fall, SAP leaders began making overtures about the possibility of a splashy acquisition. In October, for instance, McDermott had vowed that SAP was going to “let the tiger out of the cage.”

Cloud computing, where SAP’s efforts had been uneven and without much momentum, was one obvious target.

SAP had always talked a good game about the cloud, but to many analysts and customers, it was mostly just talk.

On the first Saturday in December, SAP put its money where its mouth is: SAP announced that it was acquiring SuccessFactors, a well-known cloud-based human capital management vendor, for approximately $3.4 billion.

“The cloud is a core of SAP’s future growth, and the combination of SuccessFactors’ leadership team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse,” noted McDermott in the announcement. “The acquisition will help us address the top priority for CEOs globally—managing people and talent.”

SAP is paying dearly for SuccessFactors’ cache. Notes Forrester Research analyst Paul Hamerman in a blog post on SAP’s acquisition:

The deal price of $40 per share is a 52 percent premium over the Dec. 2 closing stock price. Even more startling is that SuccessFactors has a revenue run rate of roughly $300 to $330 million for 2011, and the acquisition price of $3.4 billion is more than 10 times revenue!

But several large SAP customers had already seen big value in SuccessFactors—Siemens signed a deal for 420,000 users in 2009, and the next year, SuccessFactors inked its largest deal to date: Walmart with 2.1 million users.

Overtures of a partnership seemed to be in the cards even then. In an interview last year, SuccessFactors then-CMO Paul Albright told SearchSAP.com that the majority of its deployments weren’t rip and replace deals of SAP HCM. Customers instead were buying the software to aggregate the data in the SAP back-end and present it in a user interface people actually wanted to use.

“We don’t see SAP as a competitor,” Albright told SearchSAP.com. “We see ourselves a complementary approach, extending the value of [the applications] and getting the data in those systems unlocked.”

SAP’s Cloud Leadership Changes—Again

So who’s going to lead SAP’s newly christened SuccessFactors unit? SAP stated that upon completion of the acquisition, the CEO of SuccessFactors, Lars Dalgaard, “will lead the cloud business of SAP in addition to his responsibility as CEO of SuccessFactors,” and it will remain independent and be named “SuccessFactors, an SAP company.” (Short and sweet, eh?)

Dalgaard’s appointment should make for some interesting conversations around “job roles and responsibilities” among those SAP executives who have been jockeying for position inside SAP’s evolving cloud business.

If SAP was lacking “street cred” when it came to cloud computing as well as with its OnDemand HR apps (its new Career OnDemand app wasn’t even set for release until 2012), it certainly has some now.

But the pressure will be on SAP to explain to its customers how this HCM acquisition will fit into SAP’s overall portfolio. Many customers, in fact, have been a bit confused by SAP’s cloud offerings and roadmaps.

Courtney Bjorlin contributed to this article.

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