THE 2010 CRM MARKET AWARDS
RISING STARS
Focusing on the concept of “business execution,” SuccessFactors knows
that what happens in the workplace extends to the marketplace
Do your employees think enough about your custom- SuccessFactors is quite good at. The software-as-a-service (SaaS)
ers? The answer probably depends on whether you think provider emphasizes performance management and (thanks to
they should. SuccessFactors doesn’t leave that question open recent acquisition CubeTree) collaboration, but only as steps
for discussion. toward its true Promised Land: execution of customer-facing
Like fellow 2010 Rising Star Workday (see below), Success- business goals, or what the company calls Business Execution.
Factors is a provider of software designed to tackle processes Founded in 2001, SuccessFactors went public in Novem-
involving human resources—staffing, training, managing, and ber 2007, and has since spent heavily on sales and market-
so on. It’s a segment that some have called human capital man- ing, not to mention the bang-bang 2010 acquisitions of
agement (HCM), and there’s traditionally a bold line separat- analytics specialist Inform Business Impact (for $40.5 mil-
ing those systems from CRM software. But the reality is that lion) and collaboration-software provider CubeTree (for
the people overseen by HCM systems are the people interact- another $50 million). Jakovljevic refers to the CubeTree offer-
ing with customers on a daily basis via your CRM system. Hire ing as being “similar to Chatter,” the much-buzzed-about
the wrong salesperson, or mistrain a particular marketer, or fail product made available this year by SaaS pioneer
to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a customer service Salesforce.com. “With the acquisition of CubeTree, Success-
rep, and all your best CRM efforts are for naught. Factors will begin to push the value of social-enabled busi-
To date, only a handful of vendors and observers seem pre- ness processes,” says Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at
pared to take that holistic view. Some, such as Predrag Jakov- Forrester Research.
ljevic, principal analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers, And there are a lot of SuccessFactors users ready to receive
acknowledge the CRM-related benefits in what Jakovljevic that value—more than 8 million of them, in fact (up from
calls “setting performance targets for customer-facing employ- approximately 300,000 users in 2003), perhaps 2.1 million of
ees.” And performance-related functions, he says, are what which reportedly belong to Wal-Mart. —JW
“What’s really good about Workday