Microsoft has announced an extension of its partnership with SAP in order to provide public cloud services for the SAP SuccessFactors Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite. SAP completed acquisition of SuccessFactor in 2012 reportedly for $3.4 billion. SuccessFactor is a HCM software that combines multiple HR functions that comprises of enrolling employees, scheduling training and analyzing. SAP claims this as its first move to supplement its own infrastructure and operate SAP SuccessFactors solutions in a third-party public cloud, recognizing the experience both companies have in supporting global enterprise clients.
Microsoft and SAP are partners from last 20 years now and with Azure as an add on, SAP has a global cloud data platform to help it drive companies’ human resources transformation, and the potential to improve business outcomes. Earlier in June this year, both the companies announced joint plans to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA platform deployed on Microsoft Azure, simplify work through new integrations between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP, and provide enhanced management and security for custom SAP Fiori apps. With this expansion, SAP will have a crucial added capacity to run operational workloads of SAP SuccessFactors solutions on Azure, beginning with demo environments, to support its continuing client user growth.
Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business at Microsoft stated, “Microsoft and SAP share a commitment to empowering digital transformation across every aspect of business. The combination of SAP’s market-leading, innovative human capital management solutions with Microsoft’s intelligent cloud will equip companies around the world to help maximize the potential and skills of their most valuable asset, their people.”
According to a report in ZDNet, SAP seem to plan to maintain its own hosted version of SuccessFactors, making Azure an option, not an exclusive. The addition of Azure as an option will happen over the next five years. According to both the companies the alliance has always helped organizations use the cloud to drive innovation, agility and enable new ways to work. By aligning and integrating solutions, the alliance empowers businesses to reason over vast quantities of data and create systems of intelligence that they can use to dramatically improve their customer engagement, employee productivity, business operations and product development to give the end user unprecedented insight, convenience and agility.
SAP SuccessFactor HCM suite entails:
Employee central– Deliver real business impact with a core HR system that puts the ‘self’ back in ‘self-service’.
Recruiting– Transform recruiting into a continuous, strategic part of your talent strategy with the only end-to-end recruiting solution that helps attract, engage and select better candidates and then measure the results.
Onboarding– SAP SuccessFactors makes onboarding a strategic process that improves job satisfaction, time to productivity and first year retention.
Performance and goals– Communicate strategy, create meaningful individual goals across the organization, and focus employees on what matters, while enabling executives to monitor goal progress in real-time.
Workforce analytics and reporting– Deliver actionable, quantitative insights to your business leaders with a powerful combination of talent and business data that produces easy to understand and consume information.
Mike Ettling, President, SAP SuccessFactors said, “SAP SuccessFactors is the fastest growing core HR solution, and offers an unmatched depth and breadth across the entire HCM suite, of any vendor in the industry. We’ve seen exponential growth in the past two years, with 42 million users now benefiting from our market-leading solutions. In selecting Azure, we will be able to expand our reach even further, with the reliability that is required of these mission-critical applications, and continue to innovate and enhance services to meet client needs across additional environments.”