SAP To Acquire SuccessFactors For $3.4 Billion
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I guess they got things under control. Good for them.
I'd invested about $1000 in stock before I left; I called 'em up a few years ago (after finding out they were still around) and found out they'd done some kind of restructuring that blew my shares into oblivion somehow. Easy come, easy go.
I'm sure it's entirely legal and so forth. Let me tell you about the time I turned $10,000 into 17 shares of Oracle . . .
So it's not that you lost $1000 of SuccessFactors shares, right? It's something you had invested in some other company which was bought by SuccessFactors later, and during this conversion period existing shares were restructured, or something along with these lines.
Later, some mumbo-jumbo happened that "extinguished" the value of these shares. I'm guessing this was some kind of IP transfer, whereupon the "old SuccessFactors" went out of business, and the "new SuccessFactors" -- different company, same name -- arose.
Given how "old SuccessFactors" was being run, it doesn't surprise me.
I personally think SAP is a ridiculously overblown and complicated piece of software. It is just asking for a bunch of smaller companies to come in and slice and dice it apart. However there is huge value in going with a single provider for all your logistics needs.
I see this move by SAP as wanting to shore competition up. If SAP integrates this into their product then I'd be happy. The product will get better. If they don't...well...who knows what will happen?
Completely untrue. People that work at SAP are just like people working in startups or anywhere else. This is just made up fantasy. They can explain SAP, although at times perhaps only their area of expertise.
"I personally think SAP is a ridiculously overblown and complicated piece of software."
It isn't a piece of software, it's many pieces of software.
Some of those are complex, others are not.
"I see this move by SAP as wanting to shore competition up."
What does that even mean?!
The reality is as simple as you'd imagine. SAP is buying SuccessFactor because it doesn't have extensive experience in Cloud based delivery models, and would like to add their experience and infrastructure to SAPs.
Just like they did with Sybase, and Business Objects. This is completely obvious, and nothing in your comment made a lick of sense.
{ sarcasm: "Yes, a company that spends more on marketing and 'bribes' is just like a start up and the people that work there are too." }
What is interesting is how SAP manages to handle disruptive technologies to its existing portfolio. Does large enterprise now use SuccessFactors or SAP HCM (via NetWeaver Portal/ESS/MSS)?
For anyone interested in the theories of the Innovator's Dilemma this is an awesome example.
Furthermore, a lot of these large companies start off with a MVP hastily knocked up from 4GL tools and spend a lot of time doing customer development. (remember lean?)
Eventually they get big enough to be able to afford proper software engineering processes.
Gianforte of RightNow, a big enterprise player, started off in his bedroom with a list of possible features and lots of phone calls.
What I am interested in, however, is ideas on how to disrupt/fix enterprise software via startups.
The previous developers who put together the code aren't totally clueless people. Unless we wish for our own work to be brushed off in the same way we did to our predecessors. Future developers are going to laugh off at the cheesy way we develop our mobile and tablet apps.
Some of the original code had to work under onerous memory constraints, and have all manners of workarounds for various platform incompatibilities. Think IE6 hacks, pre-AJAX code when a sizeable portion of browsers could not script.
Do I think enterprise software as it is today can be disrupted? Yes, I do. But do I think the enterprise software vendors and developers are clueless? No, absolutely not. Many of them have adopted agile processes and are as fast as any other developer. If you want to disrupt enterprise software, you need to disrupt the sales channel, like what Salesforce and SuccessFactors did.
Go on, I am very interested :)
I think that the most important factor in big companies such as SAP or Oracle is not whether leadership is smart in their answers to new disruptions, but whether middle management is agile enough to embrace these kind of innovations.
I use SAP (in finance) and it's pretty craptacular in terms of user experience. It's generally counterintuitive and obscure. The problem with enterprise software is that the end user doesn't buy it, the buying decision is made by IT departments and executives who generally don't have to interact with the product on a daily basis.
It seems to me that the only hope for enterprise is software companies that are almost more service than software. Unfortunately, most businesses need something other than a cookie cutter solution and let's face it, that's what you get from most of these big companies, even the SaaS.
One solution is for business oriented programmers to come in and create customized solutions. Believe me, there is definitely a business case for paying a a few good hackers to create customized solutions and manage those solutions on an ongoing basis.
You just described the job of an SAP consultant :)
At SuccessFactors, I once spent about a month figuring out how to install PeopleWare. Somehow word of this leaked out, and I started receiving many cold calls from consultants offering "help" doing the install.
[Installing PeopleWare is, by the way, not for the faint of heart. I would start bad-mouthing it here, but then I wouldn't be able to stop. Let's just say that its craptacularness is fractal]
To buy something like PeopleWare, you pay several hundred thousand dollars and you get a disc in the mail. You throw away the disc and hire a roomful of consultants, each of whom arrives with their own discs full of better versions and customizations and so forth. Three years later you have PeopleWare running.
SAP, same deal (what I hear).
I will never work with Enterprise software again.
Yes. HANA is an excellent in memory database. Business Objects is really really cool at delivering data views that look great. Netweaver is a good foundation for enterprise business solutions. SAP Portal software is as excellent of a portal as you will find.
I could also list things I don't like, but to act like a huge software company like SAP doesn't have great software is silly.
"I use SAP (in finance) and it's pretty craptacular in terms of user experience. It's generally counterintuitive and obscure."
Yes, that's what I'd argue is the worst. The user experience, and this is improving after the purchase of Business Objects. You can see this changing (finally). The problem you're mentioning isn't one of finance, or SAP, it's of R3 specifically.
R3 is a big part of SAP, so most of the complaints come from the user experience of R3. Totally valid. No doubts there.
Gateway for example allows you to expose traditional SAP core functions to RESTful APIs and supports Ruby, PHP, Java, etc. So you could technically write a Rails app on top of an SAP system. If anyone in the "start-up SV" land wants more info please let me know. There is an interesting time disruptive right now in Enterprise Software and potentially a lot of money to be had. The users are finally fighting back :)
Let me say, SAP is a pig, the UI is painfully slow and non-intuitive (though consistent) especially with the various additional "usability" addons. Some things that were left out for the giant price tag are mind-boggling. This was not the promise of ERP software.
I'd equate it to buying an expensive house which comes with the foundation in place, half the framework done and a ton of materials to finish the work yourself....with sparse instructions.
This view is helpful when you want to guarantee business processes are followed correctly in a billion dollar plus company, and this is why this software is sold to CFO's and not IT Departments and End users. This view though has drawbacks when it comes to HR and you expect employees and managers to perform "softer" business processes that are not as rigid. I have implemented SAP ESS/MSS and my experience the culture of the HR staff if vastly different than that of finance and that "cog in the system" isn't working well for them and they need more tools that are "usable" for normal people. That is where I see the latest purchases of Sybase, Business Objects and now SuccessFactors coming. SAP now needs to target their software for "normal people" now that they are moving past simply providing line items to be rolled up on the general ledger
Furthermore, As for your "non cookie cutter" example, the business processes of Purchasing, General Ledger Sales are so similar that most companies that cook up custom business processes because they are designing in the dark and don't have access to information that would tell them a better way of doing it. This is where SAP comes in. If your competitive advantage is not how you execute a Purchase Order or how you move t-shirts from the distribution center to the store, why not just do it how everyone else is doing it?
SAP buys SuccessFactors, Salesforce buys Heroku, etc.
These companies have money, difficulty hiring a-game talent and a lack of industry foresight. You can help them and they'll no doubt pay handsomely for it.
SAP is not SaaS, yet. They have an offering, Business on Demand, but the Netweaver core is not SaaS, it is classic on premise.
Salesforce is biting into them. Microsoft right now has a strong campaign for cloud ERP, spearheaded by CRM. Oracle is peddling Oracle On Demand.
SAP is trying to protect their belly with this move.
We have also tried to do more year-round tracking on the progress of business objectives, but that hasn't caught on either.
My belief is that they are purchasing SuccessFactors more for their experience with the cloud based delivery model, than for their actual software.
Which is a great thing I think. Instead of trying to homebrew a cloud which isn't your core business, you buy a group who that's their bread and butter, and you integrate them with your guys, and make a real SAP cloud (on demand) solution.
And if their software isn't terrible, that's icing on the cake. Perhaps there's something to take away there, I'm just not familiar with it.
https://performancemanager4.successfactors.com/career?career...
(I used to work at SAP on Streamwork, which was done at the former Business Objects development centre in Vancouver.)
Excuse my entirely naive level of questioning, but to someone who's pretty ignorant of the 'enterprise' world, are they essentially an enterprise-level equivalent of a 37signals or similar?
They say they have 15 million subscribed users, while 37signals merely says "millions", so perhaps 37signals is worth $450m+? Or is there something about companies like SuccessFactors (perhaps big contracts, lock in clauses, or higher rates) that could lead to such large valuations?
37Signals says "millions" of users, active, inactive, paying, and free. Numbers probably way lower than that (10% of paying users?)
That is my point.