Race-Sprints Runner Image Credit Pixabay/PeteLinforthSuccessFactors has announced a new community designed to attract app builders to extend the functionality of SuccessFactors. It has also announced that the integration with Thrive Global has now been completed. The announcement about Thrive Global was made last December and the integration was finally completed in August. That it has taken this long to complete means that SAP were unable to offer up any customer comments. Hopefully that will not be the case next year, once customers start using the integration.

New community to create micro apps

The intent is for partners to create micro apps that plug the gaps or add additional features to the SuccessFactors product. Initially the apps are based in six different themes, these are:

  • well-being,
  • pay equity,
  • real-time feedback,
  • unbiased recruiting,
  • predictive performance
  • internal mobility

Thrive Global appears to be one of the first ten apps launched the other nine are:

  • Helping employees dial down financial stress with Best Money Moves
  • Ensuring employees are paid equitably with PayScale
  • Developing next-generation leaders with AI-powered coaching from Cultivate
  • Providing insightful feedback to enhance employee engagement with Culture Amp
  • Achieving diversity goals with Blendoor
  • Eliminating recruiting bias with Brilliant Hire by SAP employees in the SAP.iO Venture Studio
  • Hiring, growing and retaining top talent using AI to build a deep talent database with Plum
  • Hiring internal, external and contingent talent more effectively with AI from HiredScore
  • Mobilizing the workforce to cover understaffing with Andjaro
Greg Tomb, President, SAP SuccessFactors (Image credit Linkedin)
Greg Tomb, President, SAP SuccessFactors

SAP SuccessFactors President Greg Tomb commented: “Today, we are seeing unprecedented levels of innovation in HR technology. We believe this wave of innovation will result in a ‘human revolution’ that will allow businesses to focus time, talent and energy on the thing that really matters: the people that lead to business outcomes.

“With this community, we can help assemble a complementary set of solutions for our customers’ diverse needs. And, if they don’t exist yet, we can co-create them together.”

What is the new community?

Details of what the actual community will exist of are still unclear. However it offers four benefits to different stakeholders:

Business leaders: Get access to the latest thinking on critical people issues facing your organization (well-being, pay equity, unbiased recruiting, and more)

HR and IT professionals: Enhance existing solutions without having to overhaul core HR system and co-create solutions that solve your specific challenges

Software vendors: Build high-value applications that leverage or enrich data in SAP SuccessFactors, expedite integration via SAP Cloud Platform, and sell solutions through SAP AppCenter to >400,000 customers around the world

Entrepreneurs: Collaborate with SAP customers to co-create the next generation of HR solutions, tap into open platform and developer tools, and access personalized mentorship in partnership with SAP.iO

SAP also announced that in October it will launch a new SAP.iO Foundry in San Francisco. This is fourth Foundry after New York, Berlin and Paris. Applicants to the Foundry have access to a workspace in South Park for four months. During that period the entrepreneurs and startups have access to SAP customers and a curated program of workshops with SAP executives and mentors.

The program includes sessions on Enterprise Sales Marketing, Funding, Technology Scaling, the Procurement Gauntlet, Pricing Models, and Product Management Essentials.

What does this mean

This announcement will help to bring the wider SAP ecosystem together. Software companies looking to write apps for SAP Software are now able to write on top of a single SAP Hana database architecture. It also enables customers to see the growing strength not just of SuccessFactors but of the ecosystem of partners around it.

It is a lesson that Workday need to learn. Having announced its platform over a year ago, it has delivered very little to date. This announcement sees SAP take a lead in the ecosystem/platform race.  Will Workday respond at Rising?

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