By Greg Ryan
A unit of the German software maker SAP is subleasing a floor of office space at 60 State St. in downtown Boston, nearly doubling its footprint at its Watertown location.
SAP LeanIX (NYSE: SAP) is taking about 25,000 square feet from LinkSquares at the Boston office tower, with plans to move into the seventh-floor space this fall. It will leave behind 14,000 square feet at 1 Kingsbury Ave. in Watertown.
The deal isn’t large, but it’s notable for a few reasons. It brings a new employer into downtown Boston, where offices are still nowhere near full. And SAP is not just any employer — it’s a tech company, the industry that’s embraced hybrid or remote work more than any other.
Just before the pandemic, downtown was increasingly seen as a destination for tech firms. In 2019, the square footage sought by firms from the technology, advertising, media and information industries — TAMI, for short — made up 43% of the Boston office market, according to Colliers research. Five years later, that’s down to 7%.
With the move, SAP LeanIX is “accommodating the company’s growth as well as supporting increased collaboration at the office,” SAP said in a statement. “In addition, SAP LeanIX aims to attract even more top talent based in Boston.”
SAP acquired LeanIX, a provider of enterprise architecture management software that is also headquartered in Germany, late last year. The Watertown location has been LeanIX’s U.S. outpost.
SAP has an office in Burlington, at 1 Van de Graaff Drive, that opened in September.
The legal-tech provider LinkSquares, one of the region’s fastest-growing tech startups, has a lease for five floors, or nearly 123,000 square feet, at 60 State.