PROVO — Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith wants Utah to get it.

Well, maybe it’s not the first thing on his mind, but he thinks it would be nice if Utah understood what Qualtrics does and why its recent $8 billion acquisition by German software giant SAP is a big deal.

Qualtrics announced the acquisition Sunday, just weeks after the company filed for what would have been the biggest IPO in Utah history.

Instead, Qualtrics’ deal with SAP is the second-largest acquisition of a private tech company in history, Smith said. It trails only Facebook’s acquisition of messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.

Qualtrics has long outgrown its Provo hometown, but Smith would like Utah to understand the impact the deal will have not just on Qualtrics, but the state itself.

Though Smith sometimes feels like Utah is stuck in 1985, he’s also one of the Beehive State’s biggest promoters.

“We’re a bigger company than most people realize in the state of Utah,” Smith told KSL.com Tuesday. “We’ve got to do a better job at educating the state. … We’ve gotta kind of break things down into layman’s terms, ‘cause … there’s so much lack of education there.”

OK, fine. We'll break it down.

What does Qualtrics actually do?

If you only have a vague sense of what Qualtrics does, that’s OK — you’re not alone.

Maybe you’ve used the software as a college student when you sent out a survey on Facebook after receiving an assignment in class that required you to collect data. Maybe you have a free T-shirt sporting the company's name. Maybe you had an ex-boyfriend that used to work there.

Well, the company has evolved quite a bit over the years from simple surveys and free T-shirts.

“We created a category called ‘experience management’ where we powered the experiences of the world,” Smith said.

In early 2017, Qualtrics announced its new “experience management” platform: essentially a type of software that allows companies to find the gaps between what they’re providing and what they should be providing.

The software focuses on customer, employee, brand and product experience and collects and analyzes data to tell companies things like what they can do to improve advertising, uncover product needs, prioritize features, predict market trends and monitor a customer or employee’s experience with the company.

The software is complex, so if that’s still confusing, just know that a lot of companies pay Qualtrics a lot of money to know things they didn’t before.

Why did the company decide to be acquired instead of going public?

The company filed to go public in late October and was set to price between $5 billion and $6 billion, according to Smith. Smith was going to go ring the bell at NASDAQ on Thursday, and the company was going to celebrate.

“But we’re having a party of a different kind,” Smith said.

It was only a few days ago that Smith started talking to his longtime friend Bill McDermott, the CEO of SAP — a multinational software company with a presence all over the globe. McDermott “saw the vision” of what Qualtrics and SAP could do by joining forces and, by Sunday, the deal was done, Smith said.

“This escalated really quickly,” Smith said. “I’ve never been so fired up in the last 16 years. … If you tell me this vision of experience management, this category we created, can be taken to the world overnight with 15,000 sales reps in every single country? It’s incredible.”

Smith will still run the company, the dual headquarters will still remain in Utah and Washington, and the company will soon be hiring a lot of people, he said.

Smith also believes the deal is even better for the company's employees and says that "anyone who follows us closely would much rather be in this type of stable environment ... than what’s going on in the stock market right now."

“I think we’re gonna go build a multi-hundred-billion-dollar enterprise together,” Smith said. “That’s never … come out of Utah, so we’re pretty excited. I think the misperception is everyone’s congratulating me on an exit or things like that, and it’s like, no, we just doubled down.”

So what does this mean for Utah?

“It’s just a good win. There’s nothing you can’t do from the state of Utah. It’s like an encouraging message. There’s no downside, and it’s just going to continue,” Smith said.

Qualtrics will be doing a lot of hiring in Utah soon, and the company will also likely buy a few more buildings, Smith laughed. If Qualtrics was running at 10 mph before, they’ll now be hitting 50, he added.

And just like Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture in 2009 increased Adobe's presence in Utah, so too will Qualtrics' acquisition increase SAP's involvement in the Beehive State, said Troy D’Ambrosio with the University of Utah’s Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute.

“There’s a lot of people who have made money off that deal,” D’Ambrosio said. “That money is going to recycle back into the startup ecosystem. … I think the ripple effects are going to be felt for a very long time here in Utah.”

Silicon Slopes executive director Clint Betts believes this is the golden era of tech and entrepreneurs in Utah.

“There’s never been more capital. There’s never been more talent. There’s never been more attention on our state in our history,” he said.

Contributing: Ladd Egan, KSL TV

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