The German software giant, SAP, is well known for its enterprise, financial, customer relations and supply-chain software. Its best products include SAP ERP, SAP BW, SAP HANA and others. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg the 41-year old company serves more than 230,000 customers worldwide, however, was slow to embrace new development in the software and technology, especially adopting cloud computing. Faced with immense competition from the likes of Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce.com, it appears that it is going on a shopping spree lately in the Silicon Valley in the U.S.

According to some recent reports SAP spent more than $12 billion in the Silicon Valley since 2010 acquiring software companies. Its acquisitions include Sunnyvale, California based Ariba, a procurement software company for $4.3 billion and San Mateo, California based cloud-software maker SuccessFactors for $3.3 billion. It expects to score one large acquisition deal at least every 12 to 18 months. Prior to these new acquisitions, SAP purchased Business Objects located in France in 2007 and U.S. based Sybase. Its acquisitions are no way near more than 100 that Oracle bought for over $50 billion since 2005. New acquisitions may be its way to modernize the older company.