First off, congratulations to Sift for pulling together what will soon become a trusted hub for news and perspectives on Software-as-a-Service and Cloud Computing, says Lars Dalgaard, CEO, SuccessFactors. What better time to launch such a site?
We believe computing in the cloud is real, and ready for mainstream consumption. Why? Because the big enterprise software implementations of yesterday failed, and now more than ever, companies are looking for new and easy ways to help drive productivity across its workforce. Companies spent millions looking to automate simple processes, and those big software guys just couldn’t deliver. Projects vastly exceeded budgets, took too long to complete, or just didn’t live up to what was promised.
That failed model gave way to a new breed of providers, like SuccessFactors and others, who have delivered services and business applications over the Internet. Today there is little to debate about the success of SaaS – the model works because the customer is in control. Subscription-based vendors like us have to prove our value every single day. The low up-front costs make SaaS attractive from the start; rapid deployments enable productivity in days and weeks – not months and years; bullet-proof security in leading data centers exceeds what companies have in place, and innovation can be easily delivered – avoiding yearly or longer upgrades. SuccessFactors has more than four million users on its performance and talent management suite, and is one of the fastest growing publicly-traded software companies. We’re focused on helping companies better manage, motivate and engage their people to drive better business results
So now, the cloud computing paradigm comes along, something akin to Web Services growing up, enabling users to increase productivity from multiple data sources without the need for specific hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Sounds good, but probably doesn’t work, you say? Think again - we’ve already done it.
One of SuccessFactors’ forays into the clouds was teaming with Google on five real-world, available integrations to enable organizations to increase employee productivity and overall workforce performance. The two companies’ shared open architecture approach allowed our teams to quickly build integrations between Successfactors’ Performance and Talent Management suite and Google’s productivity and collaboration tools including Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Docs which are part of the Google Apps suite, and other Google products and services including Google Maps and Google Book Search for communication, maps, document sharing, career development exploration and calendaring.
Amber Composites, a SuccessFactors customer in the UK, manufactures composite materials used in commercial aerospace, automotive, motorsport and more, but largely recognized for work with Formula 1 teams in developing materials for on and off-road racing. As one of the hundreds of thousands of Google Apps customers, Amber was looking to integrate its performance management information (goals, performance reviews, corporate objectives) with its business communication platform, so having all of this in a single, familiar place would increase productivity for its knowledge workers.
For SuccessFactors, working with Google was another tangible way of demonstrating the value of our multi-tenant architecture, which means all of our customers leverage a single, common code base separate instances so they have complete control of their data. Being multi-tenant uniquely provides us the opportunity to take advantage of web services that are out in the Internet cloud because customers can easily opt in to take advantage of product enhancements like the Google integrations as we roll them out without a painful or expensive upgrade. Our product guys see thousand of opportunities in the clouds that can in some way impact the services we deliver. As this market expands, and customers indicate their interests, we stand ready.
Again, we congratulate everyone involved in creating BusinessCloud9. At SuccessFactors, we’ve got teams dedicated to making cloud computing an even bigger reality for our customers.
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