SuccessFactors

On taking place in the middle of May, 2012 in the American Orlando, the State of Florida, the Sapphire Now conferences heads of SAP provided a packet of available applications in a cloud. Their emergence became result of SuccessFactors acquisition made in February. Within the planned strategy the company intends to develop a packet of services for business in four main directions: people, money, customers, suppliers.

The solution integrates possibilities of a SAP software and SuccessFactors for human resources management with the conditional name "People", it carries the name Employee Central. The solution "Money" is integrated with Employee Central and is intended for management of financial processes, for example, by expenses on business trips.

As it is simple to guess from the name, the solution "Customers", first of all, includes functionality of CRM. However according to representatives of SAP, "it much development of cloud tools, available in the market". Obviously, it is about opportunities of social interaction using a SAP software of Social Customer Engagement OnDemand. The solution also assumes integration with traditional SAP applications of CRM and SAP Business Suite. At last, SAP Sourcing OnDemand for control of a full stroke of vendor interaction and contractors is the cornerstone of the solution "Suppliers".

Stefan Ried, the analyst of Forrester, in the official blog of research company expressed opinion that the announcement made at the Sapphire Now conference serves as evident confirmation of aiming of SAP at the course of transformation taken earlier from software developer for on-premise infrastructure in the supplier of the cloud services available on any device in any place. "The new strategy of SAP will inevitably concern one and all applications for large business, – Ried is sure. – It is very serious and courageous step, still leading developers were mainly limited to cloud services for a segment of SMB and could brag only of single large-scale implementations.

At the end of 2011 SAP for 3.4 billion dollars purchased SuccessFactors company, thereby having at the same time received a set of the personnel applications gaining popularity provided on demand in the order and having found an opportunity to arrange a separate portfolio of own cloud products.

Acquisition it was announced on December 3, the transaction can be made already in the first quarter 2012. The CEO of SuccessFactors Lars Dalgaard will continue to manage the company which will be transformed to independent division of SAP. Dalgaard is also invited to head cloud business of SAP in general.

SAP is not possible to build several years accurate cloud strategy. ERP- the complex SAP Business ByDesign was withdrawn from sales and processed as in the company understood that in the initial form it will not bring sufficient income to SAP. Also the target audience of ByDesign changed — now the company is guided by the small and medium enterprises and also by divisions of larger.

In addition to ByDesign, in SAP develop a number of the applications provided on demand, each of which is intended for the solution of certain tasks. One of these systems — yet not appeared personnel Career OnDemand application which on functionality is substantially blocked with SuccessFactors portfolio. Also software of joint work of SAP StreamWork and the SucessFactors Cubetree system are blocked on functions.