Success Factors Cloud Computing
Success Factors [SaaS] Talent Management Software
We believe computing in the cloud is real, and ready for mainstream consumption. Why? Because the big enterprise software implementations of yesterday failed, and now more than ever, companies are looking for new and easy ways to help drive productivity across its workforce. Companies spent millions looking to automate simple processes, and those big software guys just couldn’t deliver. Projects vastly exceeded budgets, took too long to complete, or just didn’t live up to what was promised.
— Lars Dalgaard, CEO Success Factors
Success Factors provides an integrated suite of on-demand applications in 31 languages to align businesses to their strategies, arm their organizations for success and incite their employees to greatness—every day.
Success Factors talent management solution modules include:
* Goal Management
* Employee Profile
* Performance Management
* Analytics & Reporting
* 360-Degree Reviews
* Business Performance Accelerators
* Compensation Management
* Employee Central
* Execution Survey
* Learning & Development
* Metrics Navigator
* Recruiting Management
* Stack Ranker
* Succession Management
Success Factors focuses on helping organizations align organizational goals from top to bottom and then maximize people performance for the goals. See their three minute cheesy infomercial-style solution express demo. The first 45 seconds are awful, but after that they give a good explanation of their solution.
In Q1, 2010, they acquired Inform to add analytics for workforce planning. Inform's big-company customer list—including Starbucks, Target, Nike, MetLife, Aetna, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Fidelity, Time Warner, and Comcast—complements SuccessFactors' customer base, which includes its blockbuster Siemens deal for 420,000 seats, Nestle, Toyota, Deutsche Bank and Allianz, Goldman, General Motors, Bechtel, British Petroleum, Gulfstream, and more.
Their solution does receive some criticism. As one user notes in commenting on a Bob Evans artice,
>>We have been using Successfactors for two years and I must say that we have been extremely disappointed so far. The UI is terrible and outdated, the integration of 360 review and performance modules are very weak and the reporting keeps falling down. It's hard for our HR team to keep defending our choice while we know that there are substantial difficulties that cannot even be circumvented through introducing path-ups when setting up the forms (even though our forms are extremely simple). I wish they'd spend more money on fixing issues instead of on marketing. There are other tools in the market that are better designed. For a 500 people company it?s just not worth the pain.
That said, in 2009, Success Factors grew revenue 37% to $153 million. User count grew by 35%. They now have $150 million worth of recurring revenue base from customers. They are financially stable and raised $215 million through a public stock offering.
We know two mid-market companies in Cambridge which are happy with their recent adoption of Success Factors, especially the one which switched from Peoplesoft.
Success Factors claims 5.4 million users and almost 3000 customers, however the chart below from Compete shows about 200K monthly unique visitors, perhaps only in North America, but still it seems something doesn't add up. One guess is that people are only accessing SF when it is time to write annual performance reviews or when it is time to update yearly or quarterly goals or for annual compensation decisions. So some users may only use the tool once or twice per year. Annual reviews are around the end of the year - so that may account for the spike in January. (Though some companies have annual reviews on anniversary date or at other times of year.)
We wonder which Success Factor employee is compensated on their number of users and how they measure that goal. :-)
