Following in the footsteps of its CRM counterpart Salesforce.com, Business Execution firm SuccessFactors has bought into the concept of Cloud collaboration as a key trend in Cloud Computing adoption.
While Salesforce.com has developed its own Chatter collaborative messaging offering, SuccessFactors is basing its collaboration play on an acquisition of two year old start-up CubeTree.
CubeTree is a privately funded company that makes a social business platform that enables employees to communicate and collaborate in secure fashion on specific projects. It can integrate messaging, content sharing and collaboration functions, it can be used as a basis for creating internal social networks within corporations.
It also features a set of executive dashboards that provide insights into the how the employees of a company are executing their jobs each day which plays nicely with SuccessFactors own vision of Business Execution.
CubeTree is the key to unlocking workforce productivity," said SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard. "Every CEO is interested in releasing the biggest leverage point in all organisations which exists between the functional groups. CubeTree makes those connections happen and creates a sticky, daily use, digital work pad that is relevant and fun for any type of work issue across the organisation.”
While the size of the deal – ultimately around $50 million over a period of years – is relatively small in comparison to other big ticket software takeovers of late, the significance of the acquisition lies in SuccessFactors endorsement of the collaborative Cloud strategy.
"Social software is redefining the way people communicate and share ideas," said Carlin Wiegner, CEO and co-founder of CubeTree. "CubeTree's focus has always been to improve employee execution by combining social networking with tools built for enterprises.
"We now have an opportunity to integrate CubeTree's collaboration features with SuccessFactor's core applications and to engage millions of SuccessFactors users at thousands of companies with enterprise-wide social networks."
Separately SuccessFactors revealed its quarterly figures for the quarter ended March 31, 2010 in which it significantly narrowed its losses. Revenue was $43.8 million, compared to $35.2 million in 2009, up approximately 24% year on year.
During the first quarter the firm expanded its contract with “one of the world's largest companies” - WalMart, although no-one will openly admit it! - from 300,000 deployed seats to 2.1 million. The deal was first signed over two years ago, but is now ramping up significantly.
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