
Yikes! Is Oracle Reeling In Salesforce And NetSuite?
The Manchurian Candidate Goes Silicon Valley After two intense days, a real geekfest with clients, and then catching up on the info tech happenings so far this week, I’m exhausted. Yes, we’re all buried in Oracle announcements, and it’s astonishing how wild is some of the coverage. Oracle’s partnering with Microsoft is interesting (you’ll have to […]

SAP, SAP, Wherefore Art Thou SAP?
SAP Founders 1988 — Klaus Tschira On The Left I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for SAP. When I published my first (and thus far only) 700+ page book in 1994 (“Human Resource Management and Information Technology: Achieving A Strategy Partnership”), Klaus Tschira, one of SAP’s founders, became a big fan of my […]

2012 Was Workday’s Year; Who Will Own 2013 In HR Technology?
And the winner is? [Shout-out to my colleague Lisa Rowan at IDC. Her recent guest post was the impetus for my finishing this post, which I had started right after Workday went public on 10-12-2012.] 1987: Bloom & Wallace and PeopleSoft Founded 1987 was a big year in the history of HR technology. That’s the […]

SAP’s M&A Strategy: the Key to a Successful SuccessFactors Acquisition.
As the enterprise software market parses the news that SuccessFactors will become SuccessFactors, an SAP company, the question of how well SAP manages its M&A strategy is coming to the fore. SAP has been buying small and large companies for a while, and though nowhere near as avaricious as Oracle or IBM, there are now three big […]

What Just Happened To The Talent Management Technology Spend?
What Happened To The Rest Of My Pie? I’m still working on my magnum opus (perhaps never to be finished?) post on the SAP/SFSF/Jobs2Web/all things consolidation in the HRM enterprise software market, but one question keeps pushing its way to the surface, demanding a quick post. It’s a much broader question: what just happened to the […]

Can it be third time lucky for SAP?
At first sight, the recruitment of Successfactors CEO and founder Lars Dalgaard to SAP’s executive board — once it completes its acquisition announced this weekend — looks promising. There’s been plenty of comment in the past 36 hours on how this will bolster SAP’s cloud strategy. Except that SAP doesn’t have a good record of […]

SAP/SuccessFactors — Help Me Count The HRM Codebases
Shall We Leverage Your Code Or Mine? I’m working on a mega-post about the SAP/SuccessFactors deal, but in the meantime I could use your help in making sure I’ve got the full list of HRM-related codebases that must be addressed — strategically and tactically — as a part of this deal. Much of this post […]

SAP + SuccessFactors = Great for SAP, but could restrict growth potential for the HR services industry
With SAP’s move to “Cloudify” its software portfolio with the $3.4bn acquisition of the darling of HR software, SuccessFactors, we do not believe this is particularly good news for BPO service providers and services clients

TechCrunch trivializes SAP’s $3.4B billion cloud acquisition
Photo credit: Cloud watching by Michael Krigsman TechCrunch trumpeted an odd lack of interest in SAP’s acquisition of human capital management vendor, SuccessFactors, for $3.4 billion. The popular technology startup blog offered these choice comments: In what is perhaps the most boring piece of tech news to come out of this week, German software giant […]

Revolutionary, Legendary, Incredible
Congratulations to Lars Dalgaard and his team at SuccessFactors as SAP makes a bid at a significant premium for $ 3.4 billion. His excitement is palpable as he uses plenty of big words in the press release. Let’s do a reality check here. SAP’s journey to the cloud has been rocky with names like Agassi, […]