SuccessFactors takes data to VMware Cloud Foundry

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 18 October 2011 16:24

An agreement between SuccessFactors and VMware gives customers the ability to build applications on VMware's Cloud Foundry that use data from Employee Central and other SuccessFactors software.

SuccessFactors' cloud-based Business Execution Suite - BizX - covers a wide range of employee-related functions including career and development planning, recruiting management, performance management, and workforce analytics and planning. An agreement with VMware will make data from the company's software available to applications running on VMware's Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS).

According to company officials, SuccessFactors was able to build in a matter of hours a Cloud Foundry application that mashed up employee data from SuccessFactors' Employee Central core HR system and Google Maps. Such integration can be achieved using well-known tools such as web service APIs, Java, PHP, Ruby-on-Rails, HTML, Ajax, Javascript, and the Spring Framework for Java.

"This new project takes the Cloud Foundry vision one step further, enabling customers to extend and build custom applications around SuccessFactors to address specific business and vertical use cases, without restricting the choice of development frameworks, data or application services," said VMware CEO Paul Maritz. "Cloud Foundry helps ensure customers can build applications using open and industry-standard development technologies while preserving the flexibility to deploy across both public and private clouds."

Lars Dalgaard, founder and CEO of SuccessFactors described the agreement as  "the revolution the cloud industry needs."

"Our announcement with VMware represents a paradigm shift in the way companies will consume cloud services.  We believe SuccessFactors has the world's largest cloud deployments, and we plan to empower our 3500-plus customers with 15 million subscription seats and our partners to rapidly develop custom extensions and integrations of our solutions on Cloud Foundry in an open and non-proprietary manner," he added.

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