Today Salesforce. com announced plans to acquire Rypple, a small but growing provider of social performance management software. In addition, the company announced plans to build out a set of human capital management products called SuccessForce (quite a stab in the eye to SuccessFactors), built on the "social enterprise" which Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce. com) has been so eloquently describing. There are many drivers and dimensions to this announcement, so let me make some initial observations and offer more information as we talk with the companies in more detail.
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Today I had a chat with Paul Sparta, the founder of Plateau and one of the key product leaders at SuccessFactors and now SAP.  Paul, who's current title is Chief Integration Officer, shared some important thoughts with me which I felt were worth publishing. 1.  As a result of the acquisition, the SuccessFactors and Plateau teams now have thousands of SAP customers to work with, and they feel that their job is to slowly but openly build product plans to make sure these customers are successful.  The original acquisition was done at a very high level, and only now are the product groups even starting to understand the potential directions for all the SuccessFactors, Plateau, and SAP products.
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We all know that talent management is a hot topic in business today.  SAP's acquisition of SuccessFactors for $3. 4 billion demonstrates how important this market is to businesses around the world. But ultimately it isn't software that drives business results: it's the practices of talent management that matters.  Our research shows that companies which implement superior talent management programs are generating 26% higher revenues per employee and have 40% lower turnover.
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This weekend SAP announced plans to acquire SuccessFactors for approximately $3. 4 billion (almost 10X 2011 revenues). Just last week we delivered a webinar on trends in the Talent Management Systems market, and discussed the fact that this market is rapidly becoming commoditized and that the big vendors were starting to make a major impact. Listen to this webinar to get a good understanding of where this market is going.  (Click here for the replay.
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