Taleo vs SuccessFactors

SaaS-arms race between Oracle and SAP continues. After SAP acquired the leader of the talent management market - SuccessFactors, Oracle's boss Larry Ellison could not sleep in peace. In order to calm down a little he decided to buy the second company in this market - Taleo. (Not so long ago we compared SuccessFactors vs Taleo). The deal amount - $ 1.9 billion. Taleo is famous primarily for it's personal compensation tools and head-hunting tools, integrated with social networks. As usual in such cases we say that this deal is a big sign for those who still doubt in SaaS. If Larry Ellison, who doubted more than others and who already owns the HRM system PeopelSoft, buys the SaaS-alternative - it's a big sign.

Everyone knows that "talent is everything". Everyone knows that 80% of his time boss should  devote to employees and their motivation. But in practice, boss remember about an employee only when he did something wrong and proved once again that his salary is too high. However, as competition in all areas is growing and business becomes more and more dependent of its talents, this outdated practice will only lead to deadpool. That's why talent management software and services are now experiencing a rapid growth. In the recent SaaS tool ratings talent management (and related technologies - HRM and e-Recruting) - are among most demanded. In this talent management market two gorillas have emerged: Taleo and SuccessFactors. And both these companies provide SaaS solutions.

(SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard)SAP (aka the world largest developer of business software) has won the reputation of the SaaS-snail. Not because SAP wasn't trying to build SaaS solutions. It launched StreamWork, CRM On-demand, Business ByDesign. But all these projects were implemented without much desire, so none of them caught the wave. And it's quite understandable. SAP really doesn't need these miserable $50/month per user, when it makes millions just for one-time sale of its monster systems and projects. But with these earned money, SAP can easily buy the title of SaaS-champion. SAP Ventures has long been sponsoring many SaaS-startups. For example, SAP stands behind such projects as SocialText, Box.net, Alfresco. And now, SAP has decided to play a big game and acquired (perhaps the second company on the SaaS market) SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion.

An interesting new trend is emerging: SaaS vendors start to use third-party PaaS services as platforms for their own clients and partners. Let's first consider the ordinary situation. For example, there was such SaaS provider as Salesforce. And it provided the online CRM system. The system was growing but the customers wanted more and more new features. Then Salesforce management thought: "we can't implement so many features, and it's not right to make the system too complicated. Let's better create a (PaaS) platform, and let our customers and partners create add-on apps and functions themselves. That's how Force.com appeared. And many others SaaS vendors headed the same way: Google, NetSuite, Intuit, Box.net ... But not all SaaS-providers are so mighty to create own PaaS platform. Or maybe creating own PaaS-platform - is not the smartest option. Why not use one of the existing PaaS-services, such as Force.com?

It wasn't so easy to create a list of the largest SaaS projects. Because though SaaS vendors would like to promote themselves, they often have no clearance from customer to go public on their deployments. Sometimes, when a dispute on the largest projects starts, they claim that they have a customer with XXX users, but don't tell what customer and provide no proof. Therefore, our rating is based on unverified information. However, it is interesting that neither Salesforce nor Google Apps are included in it. And four out of five deployments - are talent management (or human capital - HRM) systems:

Gartner has published the Magic Quadrant for enterprise Social Software market 2010. In the previous similar report in 2009 the MQ reminded the Brownian movement of molecules because of the large number of vendors and approaches to the enterprise social tools. That's why Gartner decided to clarify its approach. At first, they split the Social Software for internal and external. The external was defined as Social CRM - and moved to the separate report. And this Magic Quadrant is focused only on internal social tools, designed for collaboration within enterprise. Additionally in order to mute the noise, Gartner introduced several restrictions. First, each vendor should have at least 100,000 end users. Second, each product should include the following social tools:

Everyone knows that "talent is everything". Everyone knows that 80% of his time boss should  devote to employees and their motivation. But in practice, boss remember about an employee only when he did something wrong and proved once again that his salary is too high. However, as competition in all areas is growing and business becomes more and more dependent of its talents, this outdated practice will only lead to deadpool. That's why talent management software and services are now experiencing a rapid growth. In the recent SaaS tool ratings talent management (and related technologies - HRM and e-Recruting) - are among most demanded. In this talent management market two gorillas have emerged: Taleo and SuccessFactors. And both these companies provide SaaS solutions.