It's a busy time for SuccessFactors. Alongside an upgrade to its core BizX offering, the firm's been on the acquisition trail again, this time snapping up Jambok, a SaaS-based social learning company.
So what's a social learning company? Well as you might imagine it's the crossroads between e-learning and social media. Jambok is said to :
For SuccessFactors, this represents a complementary technology to its established BizX offering. CEO Lars Dalgaard explains that social learning is all about organisations and individuals having the ability to tap into the informal learning that happens on the job. This ability is limited by traditional learning technologies and practices and as a result the power of user-generated content remains untapped:
Aspects of the Jambok technology will be added to the BizX suite to enable:
- Content Creation & Sharing through tools to share existing multimedia files, documents, videos and/or audio content through a webcam, as well as capture narrated screen casts. This will enable users to publish with one-click to a community using a web browser on a computer or mobile device.
- User-centric Social Capabilities including user-generated ratings of content, user-assigned taxonomy applied to content, user-based feedback on content, granular content sorting capabilities and content filtering.
- A community-based approach allowing flexible and secure targeting of content for specific groups of users based on topic, interest or projects.
Jambok brings with it some big name users, such as Mitsubishi, Reuters and Nike. Joe Campbell, director of talent development & global design and delivery solutions, Nike, comments:
Away from the social learning front, the latest upgrade to BizX has also been unveiled with the emphasis on new Cloud analytics, mobile access and social collaboration features. These include:
- Analytics for All is based on the principle that workforce-related metrics aren't just for HR and enables business managers to monitor metrics, including their team members' performance, with analytics via email push notifications that provide drill-down details to promote proactive decision-making.
- Answers While You Work enables end users to see the real-time impact of changes in analytics, starting with metrics related to pay-for-performance and budget allocation.
- Mobile Recruiting enables interviewers to give candidate feedback and managers can approve job requisitions from mobile devices to increase efficiency and cut down on delays.
- Mobile Documents is intended to allow employees to review and comment on documents shared via CubeTree directly from mobile devices. Mobile Alerts provide employees with instant notifications for messages or replies to CubeTree comments on mobile devices.
- Mobile Contacts enables end users to find contact details for anyone within the organization and call, email, text or direct message with one click straight from iPhone, Blackberry or iPad.
- Social Sourcing sees Recruiting integrated with Jobvite to tap into hundreds of external social networks and employees' own connections to find the best candidates.
- Auto Profile automatically pre-populates employee profiles and organisational structure.
- Smart Groups automatically assigns employees to relevant groups across the company based on information from their profile, including their start date, role, geographic location and department.
- Easy Document Management makes SharePoint-housed documents visible in CubeTree where employees can make comments and suggestions.
- Globally Aware enables collaboration data to be housed in an EU data centre and CubeTree to be rolled out in multiple languages, including French, German, English, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.
Taken together, the two sets of announcements indicate a continutation of a policy that seems to be paying dividends for SuccessFactors - a combination of internal enhancement and development bolstered by tactical acquistions to beef up the functionality into new areas. In February the firm reported fourth quarter sales of $61.7 million compared to the company's earlier projections they would be around $56 million while revenues for the full year were up 46 percent year over year.
The firm has done a good job to date of pitching the BizX message and the firm's success at customers such as Siemens cannot be ignored, but in the fast changing world of the Cloud, being seen to be constantly moving forward is a key attribute. Given the recent signs of bullishness from Workday, particularly in terms of European expansion, it's wise for SuccessFactors to keep with its innovation and execution memes. This market is set to get much more turbulent.
