SAP dropped a whopping $3.4 billion on human capital management software company SuccessFactors back in December. Two months later, the deal has finally closed and SAP isn’t wasting any time in releasing a product roadmap for SuccessFactors now that the company is part of the SAP family.
As the New York Times reported back in December, SAP saw SuccessFactors as one entry point into the cloud. Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman told the publication at the time that “The cloud has been a small part of SAP’s revenue stream, about 2 percent; the deal adds to the revenue base and shows SAP’s strong commitment to the software-as-a-service business model.”
Today, SAP says that SuccessFactors’ software will be combined with SAP solutions to provide a comprehensive offering to clients. SAP will continue to offer its own Human Capital Management on premise solution but will be pushing SuccessFactors’ performance, compensation, recruiting and learning management products in the cloud. The talent management components from SAP’s software will be selectively innovated on, says the company.
Basically, SAP’s existing HCM products will be the on-premise offering and SuccessFactors will be deployed in the cloud. There are currently no plans to phase out any SuccessFactors products, says SAP.
SAP explains that data and analytics will be a focus area for further innovations in both SuccessFactors and SAP’s HCM offerings. SuccessFactors software will be integrated with SAP’s data analysis product HANA.
The human capital management industry is huge and big enterprise companies are betting that the cloud is the future of this space. Salesforce just announced the acquisition of social performance platform Rypple, and will be launching a new product and SuccessFactors-rival, Successforce. Oracle just bought talent management software company Taleo for $1.9 billion a few weeks ago. With all these companies throwing their hats in the ring, it should be interesting to see which one can emerge as the leader.