Copado advances SaaS Devops with acquisitions of SAP ecosystem firms Qualibrate and IOVIO
Copado, an independent software vendor based in Chicago, and the largest Salesforce devops platform provider, this week announced it has acquired Qualibrate, a leading SAP automated testing solution, and IOVIO, an SAP services company. “To deliver the highest quality customer experiences, companies are finding that test automation must work across all systems that impact the customer, from CRM to ERP,” said Ted Elliott, Chief Executive Officer for Copado. “By broadening our offering with solutions and services from Qualibrate and IOVIO, customers will now have access to incredible expertise in back office and SAP and no-code testing to accelerate multi-cloud transformation and deliver world-class customer experiences. Copado is committed to transforming how customers accelerate their transformation strategies by automating quality deployments and ending release days,” added Mr. Elliot in a press release. The financial terms of the deal were not announced, except to note that existing employees will be folded into Copado operations.
SAP Ecosystem is Next
As enterprises look to speed up digital transformation by using SaaS platforms, they have picked Salesforce in droves. Now, this increased demand for Salesforce devops products and services challenges devops vendors to innovate and compete. Due to the progress in Salesforce devops, there are now expectations that Salesforce can be tamed and used in a production environment. And other vendors are starting to talk about SAP and Oracle devops. This is largely because of the success of companies like Copado and other Salesforce devops vendors.
It is like Salesforce devops companies are swords that has been tempered in the forge of innovation. And now some of them, like Copado, have come out of the forge battle-ready to take on the rest of the world.
According to Copado, the Qualibrate acquisition is like the Qentinel deal from 2021. This is because Qualibrate’s products are to be merged into the Copado Robotic Testing service. New Copado Robotic Testing services will soon cover most SAP products including SAP S/4HANA, SAP ECC, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Commerce Cloud.
IOVIO is a professional services firm focused on enterprise IT services for SAP customers. According to IOVIO’s website and associated LinkedIn pages, the company’s workforce is based in the European Union and Mexico, and it has about 40 employees. According to LinkedIn, several employees for IOVIO have worked at Qualibrate, so the firms are tightly linked.
SaaS Devops Grows
Picking SAP for its next market makes sense for Copado. Thousands of enterprises use SAP on-premises and cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to manage complex business operations. Enterprises that use ERP software include automakers, airlines, hotels, conglomerates, and governments.
Although IOVIO does seem to be a service provider acquihire, Qualibrate and IOVIO together gives Copado an established SAP devops tool plus a dedicated system integration workforce.
This announcement now positions Copado in the “SaaS devops” market. Copado may now reasonably claim they are not just Salesforce anymore. However, there is a risk to succeed with this type of growth strategy. We will have to wait and see whether the new pieces will work synergistically. Or if the result seems to be a company stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. Only time will tell.
