Siemen's Global SuccessFactors Cloud

The new Siemens talent managing environment being deployed by SuccessFactors is more like the entire troposphere than a cloud solution; 420k users across 80 countries in 20 languages will be linked and unified in one giant environment.

Replacing existing multiple HR talent systems globally with Successfactor's on demand software as a service performance and talent management modules - including Goal Management, Performance Management, Career Development Planning, Compensation Management, Variable Pay, Succession Planning and Recruiting Management this company wide rollout really draws attention to the maturity of cloud computing.

Siemens is a €77.3 billion global juggernaut of a company, and managing their entire staff is not a strategic decision to be taken lightly - from today's press release:

"Our board has a global vision which is a worldwide strategic focus for us today,” said Mrs. Horstmann, Head of Corporate Human Resources, Strategy and Leadership Development of Siemens AG

“SuccessFactors will be instrumental in helping us achieve these core objectives by closing the gap between strategy and execution. It will also enable us to globalize onto a single platform, clearly separate strategic execution and management from transactional HR. We conducted an in-depth market evaluation of 30 leading vendors and seven system providers Siemens already had over five months, with our end-users stress testing the software quality, global scalability, and innovation potential. SuccessFactors was the clear winner by a significant margin based on its usability, ease of integration, rich functionality".

Mr. Kleinjohann, head of CIT, “The Enterprise Cloud Computing business model is a strategic direction for us. It not only lowers IT costs, and creates faster end to end processes, but can also grow with our requirements both globally and locally.”

There are interesting parallels here to GE's Support Central which I wrote about in July last year.

SuccessFactors dwarf SalesForce in size, who have their services translated into 16 different languages and currently have 59,300 customers and over 1,500,000 subscribers.

SuccessFactors by comparison has more than 2,700 customers and 4.7 million end users today, with solutions widely deployed across 60 industries in over 185 countries and 31 languages.

An SaaS cloud based company from day one in 2001, SuccessFactors has succeeded due to providing  affordable, integrated, on-demand Performance & Talent Management suites for businesses of every shape and size.

Strategic Human Capital Management is a critical component in the execution of tactical objectives: it speaks volumes that arguably some of the most sensitive information within Siemens is being entrusted to a single enterprise cloud.

At the lower end of the troposphere, SuccessFactors is geared up to serve Small Business (1-500 employees), Mid-Size Business (501-2,500 employees), Enterprise Business (2,501-20,000 employees) and Mega Business (20,000+ employees). Like Amazon's elastic cloud computing, the flexibility for rapid ascent towards the stratosphere (or descent to earth in the current economic climate) is made much easier.

Tightly aligning the goals of individual employees with those of your company are an important component of collaboration strategy. Talent Management Systems are focused on providing strategic alignment to organizations in the accomplishment of long-term enterprise goals with respect to talent, or human capital, where traditional Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are primarily  back office transactional processing and administrators of basic HR processes such as personnel, payroll, time management, etc.

Employee Central

also being announce today in beta is Employee Central, a new module that:

...allows companies to maintain a centralized employee information and collaboration hub that gives managers and executives a more complete picture of their people. Employee Central stores all types of information from the most basic employee information like addresses, personal information and work eligibility status to more important information such as skills, experience, languages spoken career aspirations, and key performance and compensation information, giving business leaders all the tools they need to make strategic decisions about their talent to improve business performance.

I'll be talking to SuccessFactor's VP of Cloud Computing Tom Fisher and David Karel, VP of Product Marketing tomorrow at their San Francisco 'SuccessConnect' conference where I hope to also take a look at Employee Central.

I'm looking forward to discussing the disruption to the old way of translating strategy into execution, command and control management and staff training, and how modern unstructured collaborative techniques and associated technologies can intersect with these cloud backbone modules.