The deal with SAP is certainly a good one financially for Qualtrics in the short term. Ryan and Jared Smith, along with their father Scott, will collect more than $3 billion for their stake. That’s against a lower valuation in an unpredictable stock market. The similar, if less impressive, company SurveyMonkey, which only went public in September, is trading below its I.P.O. price.

Ryan Smith, the chief executive of Qualtrics, will remain in charge, and the company will keep its brand and two headquarters in the United States. Being part of a $130 billion behemoth may erode autonomy, but there were risks in the original plan too. Buyers of public Qualtrics shares could have eventually resented the tight control that the Smiths were going to retain through super-voting rights and other mechanisms.

Qualtrics collects data and feedback on a business’s customers, employees, products and brands — something it calls experience management, or XM. It has produced positive free cash flow every year since its founding in 2002, according to I.P.O. filings. Not being a drain on resources makes it less likely that SAP will interfere.

Despite the cloud of jargon, there’s also visible scope for mutual benefit. SAP claims around 413,000 customers, while Qualtrics has a mere 9,000 or so. Revenue synergies can be questionable, but when a much smaller company’s products — especially scalable cloud-based ones — can be inserted into the marketing channels of a far larger entity, top-line gains seem less far-fetched.

At 20 times the company’s forecast revenue for 2018, SAP is paying up for Qualtrics, though control ought to merit a premium to second-class public-market shares. But SAP’s Mr. McDermott sees XM as a new frontier for the operations-heavy group, and has breathlessly likened the deal to Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012. If he can make the analogy hold, Qualtrics will soon matter far more to SAP than the deal price suggests.