It's a love story akin to the recent Royal Wedding. Well sort of... Not very long ago I went to Rome to see Plateau and their user conference. Plateau offer a learning - and maybe talent management - platform, and their CEO, Paul Sparta, has a reputation for being transparent and forging partnerships with other businesses.
But open as they were about their newest partnership, SuccessFactors, there was one thing Sparta hadn't told the analysts and media gathered for his briefing.
They were being bought by the Cloud company. This wasn't a partnership so much as a marriage. This was for keeps. It may not have been signed, sealed and delivered at the time, but it was pretty close, and the employees there knew it. It was, admitted some in the know at SuccessConnect in Amsterdam this May, pretty awkward to have to keep it quiet amid the questioning and curiosity.
When we asked why Plateau didn’t buy SuccessFactors, no wonder there was so much laughter, but I didn't realise it was going to be so soon. To be fair, it looked like they were lining it up, but I thought it'd be a year or more before anything actually happened. I'd certainly never seen a company love-in like it, but in my naivety of these types of events, and coming from the UK, when faced with a US company - sometimes you doubt yourself. I should have followed my instinct on this one.
Their technology was already being streamlined and made compatible, so it seems logical. The HR technology marketplace has been shrinking, and as Paul told me, the two companies were always coming up against each other in tenders: "We competed aggressively," he said. But he added that there had always been a healthy respect between him and Lars. Sparta added that I would never find him being negative about Dalgaard - on record.
"In the heat of the moment, who knows...but in public, on record, never." Dalgaard wasn't in the interview to give his support but communications chief Andrea added that the feeling was mutual - no matter what Lars might have said about others in the industry, he has never been disrespectful on record about Paul.
The biggest thing perhaps for current Plateau customers is the realisation that Plateau meant what they said five years ago - Cloud is the future. The company has not invested in 'on-prem' in five years now and although SuccessFactors have promised to support the legacy on-premise customers, they won't be able to escape the Cloud forever.
The other people who are perhaps shaken by this are the close prospects Plateau had. Sparta said: "The biggest change is obviously going to be where we have some product overlap. This is all about customers and neither side has any intention of twisting a customer’s arm. We have worked hard to get in the leader quadrant of the Gartner magic quadrant and we had good success with our strategy but obviously SuccessFactors has sold more than anybody else in the same space so that’s an area where if someone was considering Plateau would need to step back and take a look at the landscape. Maybe it’s a better choice to go straight to SuccessFactors."
Legally, currently, the two companies cannot land deals together or act as a single entity - not until the deal is sealed, which will happen this summer.
He points out that this purchase is a positive - instead of a market leader buying an older, slower company or a big player purchasing one which is about to go under, it's a company which doesn't do learning very well buying a company which does - and taking out the competition in the process. For Plateau, strong on learning but losing out to Succesfactors on talent, it makes sense, although it must have been a hard decision to take.
The other thing that SuccessFactors is keen to point out is how Plateau's learning platform will also benefit from the social aspects of the SuccessFactors suite. Cubetree - their answer to 'Facebook for the enterprise' and the Salesforce Chatter application, is a social platform and they are keen demonstrate that the integrated offerings will enable formal learning to merge with informal and allow seamless, intuitive blended learning and reinforce learning. It's certainly made a strong prospect for organisations interested in a one-platform solution (and who isn’t?) to consider.
