New User-Centric Innovation Delights and Engages Millions of Business Users That Are ‘On SuccessFactors’

May 10, 2007; 03:34 AM
SuccessFactors, the global leader in on-demand Performance & Talent Management solutions, today unveiled five new user-centric business tools to further delight and engage the more than 2 million business users already on SuccessFactors. Built by SuccessFactors NEXT Labs, a devoted team of consumer user interface experts from companies such as Apple, Mattel, Netscape and eBay, the new tools are designed to be as engaging, fun and interactive as today’s most exciting, consumer-facing Internet applications.

Officially introduced in January 2007, the NEXT Labs initiative is part of SuccessFactors’ larger strategic push toward building the most active, broadly used Web-based business application on the planet. With more than 2 million active users in 156 countries across nearly 60 industries, SuccessFactors is rapidly becoming a standard for the way companies measure, manage and motivate their people. Because SuccessFactors is used by just about everyone in a company, and not just by individual business or functional units, it has to be more intuitive, easy-to-use and engaging than most business software.

SuccessFactors NEXT Labs leverages the latest Web technologies including AJAX and Web services, along with Web 2.0 concepts such as social networking, mash-ups, and dynamic information tagging to make the overall solution intuitive and easy to use, all while creating a valuable, visionary human capital management application that grows the relationship between a company and its employees.

“It is most rewarding to have a business partner that is committed to user-centric innovation, as demonstrated by SuccessFactors NEXT,” said Peter Han, Sr. Manager of Organizational Development for Baker Hughes, Inc. ”By embracing cutting-edge web technology for the benefit of customers’ end-users, SuccessFactors is providing a continuous stream of innovative, practical, and user-focused tools for talent management.”

“Many companies tout their vision but SuccessFactors has set itself apart by making their vision a reality,” said Kevin Tarrant, VP of Global Organization Effectiveness for Arrow Electronics. “Arrow Electronics is already attaining value from SuccessFactors NEXT through usage of the NEXT Employee Directory by employees around the world.”

Today, SuccessFactors officially announced the availability of the first wave of end-user endorsed NEXT Labs capabilities — all of which are fully integrated into the company’s Performance & Talent Management suite and delivering value to end users today, and include:

• Personal Coach: Highly interactive coach that helps employees and managers with effortless personalized coaching support based on previously identified competency gaps. The coach delivers highly valuable and insightful mentoring and career advice to all users on the spot.
• Company Barometer: A fun and valuable digital polling capability that allows employees to give their opinion on any subject, allowing executives to get a real-time, instantaneous connection to the pulse of the company while affording employees the opportunity to shape company decisions.
• SMART Goal Wizard: A highly intuitive and visually satisfying goal-writing assistant that aids employees in creating goals which follow the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) methodology; delivered with hundreds of inline predefined goals and metrics to choose from as a starting point for individual goal setting.
• Employee Directory: A rich social networking platform for employee collaboration across the enterprise providing instant access to people anywhere in the world. The directory delivers a host of key information about individuals and breaks the traditional enterprise software barrier to seamlessly access external internet services such as Skype, Google, Yahoo Weather, and more.
• Deep Linking: An effortless electronic linking capability that allows users to instantly connect to other employees from anywhere within the application and view their goals, profile, and other relevant data.

“SuccessFactors NEXT Labs was established to define, test, and deliver highly intuitive, instantly valuable, engaging, and innovative capabilities to the SuccessFactors suite of Performance & Talent Management applications,” said Rob Bernshteyn, vice president of product marketing. “Rapidly iterating on prototypes with end-users around the world and swiftly developing the best concepts have allowed us to provide real tangible value to our growing base of millions of end-users.”

About SuccessFactors

SuccessFactors delivers performance and talent excellence, on demand. The company’s software promotes visibility, accountability and results, enabling organizations to eliminate the politics that destroy motivation and impede performance. Fueled by the industry’s highest renewal rate, SuccessFactors has grown in the past 12 months from 346 customers to more than 1,300 customers and from 1 million users to more than 2 million users in 156 countries, across 60 industries, and in 18 languages – all while becoming easier to use. During that period, the company nearly doubled its employee base, currently employing more than 450 people, passionate about effective human capital management. Carefully managed and executed internal growth has allowed the company to provide the same caliber of absolute excellence in execution for customers that catapulted SuccessFactors into the product, customer and revenue leader in the performance and talent management space. Customers include Kimberly-Clark Corporation, MasterCard Worldwide, T. Rowe Price, Textron, Sutter Healthcare, Direct Energy, Arrow Electronics, Quintiles Transnational, Volkswagen of North America, Lancaster General Hospital and Salesforce.com. The company continues to execute at a level of global excellence by providing an industry-leading, scalable and secure global hosting operation. Founded in 2001, SuccessFactors has 15 worldwide offices collaborating for strong local support of customers. For more information, visit http://www.successfactors.com/.