Workday

The HCM is a key area of growth in the economy going forward. Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, Performance Management, Career Succession, Competency Management are becoming more n more strategic now.

With acquisition of SuccessFactors by SAP, Taleo by Oracle or Kenexa by IBM big players are consolidating their positions in the light of growing competition from relatively new players like Workday, Ultimate Software, Cornerstone OnDemand and likes.

The “cloud” is a buzz-word that refers to the new way applications are being delivered: over the Internet. And with this acquisition of SuccessFactors SAP has taken a leap to embrace the cloud . This is a huge cloud play, stealing the initiative over the other full-stack providers. Acquiring at $3.4b, whopping 49 percent premium over SuccessFactors’ market value, the deal has given SAP advantages many-fold. One SAP was way behind the cloud movement, and this purchase will help it catch up with the competition in cloud space. Forrester rated the Plateau Systems, talent management software which was acquired by SuccessFactors. the best in its sector, Effectively SuccessFactors fills a big hole in SAP’s own offering and at the same time it is free from the chains of SAP’s enterprise software sale legacy. This could herald a bigger break at SAP in the future.

Another advantage is that SAP and SuccessFactors have complementary customer bases, allowing for cross-sell. With seamless integration with SAP’s back-end could make SuccessFactors more compelling
SAP says it is going to let SuccessFactors run independently, with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription model. It’s a nice complement to SAP’s analytics and mobile strategies.

SAP has kicked off two key initiatives lately, namely the building of an in-memory database computing technology (called HANA), to speed up analytics within applications, and a move to allow software to work wirelessly on any device.

However there are a lot of questions that still need to be addressed regarding the integration of SuccessFactors overall, not to mention other challenges integrating the social business assets of SuccessFactors, which includes CubeTree, a collaborative software that includes things like wikis, blogs, polls and filesharing. But for sure the battle for HR space is intensifying.

Workday is making serious inroads into the Enterprise HR space at the expense of the legacy providers offering 100% replacement business for Oracle HR, PeopleSoft HR and SAP HR, offering a more modern feature set at a better price and a lower total cost because businesses can buy into it as a service rather than having to maintain ownership over it. Still, Workday is a long way off from displacing Oracle and SAP’s competing HR services both, still serving over 10,000 clients each. The larger companies are doing their best to catch up, which includes heavy acquisitions. Last December, SAP announced it would spend $3.4 billion on the human capital management software company SuccessFactors. Meanwhile, Oracle bought Taleo, which develops employee recruitment software, for $1.9 billion. Surely PeopleSoft’s leading position in HR space is at stake and it will be interesting to see the fight between the three getting more intensified in the coming time.

SuccessFactors vs Taleo/Kenexa/Workday/Ultimate/Cornerstone…

Workday vs PeopleSoft / Oracle / SAP