It’s a lot more fun when the winds are blowing your way. You get that feeling when you go to a SaaS users conference like the one today for SuccessFactors.
SuccessFactors is a company that has established its own pillar in the enterprise. Just as Salesforce.com established its pillar for the sales world, SuccessFactors is establishing itself as a pillar in the world of employee productivity, with human resources as the anchor for its expansion.
These SaaS companies have something in common. They are now big enough to use their position in the market to expand deeper into the enterprise. They have their own sizable market capitalization to challenge the traditional technology giants, make their own acquisitions and cut a path for growth.
For example, Salesforce.com completed its acquisition today for Jigsaw, the crowdsourcing application for contact management.
For SuccessFactors, its acquisitions played a big part in its announcements today. For example, the company acquired Inform earlier this year and now has it integrated the analytics technology with SuccessFactors BizX, a core service for the company.
SuccessFactors BizX Insights uses charts and graphics to essentially tell a story. It’s this dynamic analytics environment which serves as the core for managers to better understand the forces at play with employees. You see this with the Insights product. The service core functionality is to track goals in a question-based format to better understand, for instance, how executive level goals are cascading through the enterprise.
In the presentation, CEO Lars Daalgard showed how a company can see how long it is taking for a company to complete goals. He showed how it can track store managers and their completion rate. If it is taking too long then the company can start to implement ways to cut the time it takes to get the goal completed.
Companies like SuccessFactors give the enterprise a different way to view the people who work for the organization and those who it is considering hiring.
Last week, SuccessFactors acquired CubeTree. One of the first integrations is to provide a way for companies to view resumes in an activity stream. As demonstrated, the resumes appear horizontally in the person’s update. Each resume may be viewed with comments added in the document. That collaborative commenting capability is a core feature CubeTree provides. The service is intended to be a social network for the entire enterprise with the capabilities to collaborate on documents.
Without a doubt, SaaS companies are on the rise. Should we expect more acquisitions? It seems so, especially as the winds of change blow further into the enterprise.
