We had the opportunity to attend SAP SuccessFactors SConnect event in Las Vegas this week, held from August 29th till 31st 2016 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. The conference had (in my records) the best attendance since I am attending in 2013, with over 4000 attendees coming from customers, prospects and partners.
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So take a look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)
No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):
Want to read on? Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my top ones:
New User Interface - The new user interface is certainly the most impressive advancement across all that SuccessFactors delivery plans. In the past there was often a lack of consistency across the SuccessFactors products, that the vendor is now addressing. The new UI, starting with the high frequency screens looks attractive and feedback from users was positive to very positive. Now we will watch what real world feedback is going to be and what the next set of improvements SuccessFactors will put in places.
The Centers have come and more are coming– Last year SuccessFactors introduced the center concept. A single place to look for functions or content, one year later we can state that the Center concept has been well accepted and more centers are on the way. The Release and Report Center are the ones that stood out in my view, as getting customers faster on a release and finding reporting information is always valuable. But there are many more and SuccessFactors is certainly up to something here.
Intelligent Services– Another capability that SuccessFactors debuted last year, Intelligent Service – is seeing good uptake by customers, some executives even shared better uptake than they expected. Personally I am not surprised, as automating more repetitive tasks is something not only HR professionals but especially business users have been asking for a long time. The debate if Intelligent Services is ‘just workflow’ keeps going on, but at the end it does not matter what it can be labelled as from a taxonomy standpoint, what matters is that functionality provides day to day value for SuccessFactors users. And that was a question last year – by now from adoption and customer conversations there is no question anymore.
Performance Management keeps getting continuous– When SAP unveiled its plans to come up with a different approach to Performance Management, there was general surprise. After all, SuccessFactors is the ‘800-pound gorilla’ in Performance Management and gorillas are not know for disrupting themselves. So kudos for that to SuccessFactors, on the flipside the direction of a more continuous form of Performance Management is not in the league with e.g. Columbus finding America. But HR professionals don’t want risky discovery, but a solution to the inaptitude of current Performance Management, and the new SuccessFactors offering is working well in these regards. Also good to see that SuccessFactors did not rest and is building more capabilities into Performance Management.
On the concern side SAP must – like all vendors with a history in the enterprise software market – address the question of technical debt. Some of the acquired older SuccessFactors products are turning double digit if not teenage years old, always a point to rethink and possible rebuild products. At the same time SAP as a company overall is on the quest of rebuilding the suite with S/4HANA and that has repercussions on all product lines – that at least need to be answered (see the BW/HANA announcement happening in parallel). But that is not only a problem for SAP / SuccessFactors – nonetheless an area to watch.
Overall a good event, good to see activity and progress on all fronts. We also learnt that SAP has an ambitious partner agenda – that should drive EmployeeCentral customers to 2000 by end of the year – from a current base of 1200 and change. We will be watching, but for now congrats to SuccessFactors to a good event, showing value to customers across the SAP HCM capabilities.
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.
So take a look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)
New User Interface - The new user interface is certainly the most impressive advancement across all that SuccessFactors delivery plans. In the past there was often a lack of consistency across the SuccessFactors products, that the vendor is now addressing. The new UI, starting with the high frequency screens looks attractive and feedback from users was positive to very positive. Now we will watch what real world feedback is going to be and what the next set of improvements SuccessFactors will put in places.
The Centers have come and more are coming– Last year SuccessFactors introduced the center concept. A single place to look for functions or content, one year later we can state that the Center concept has been well accepted and more centers are on the way. The Release and Report Center are the ones that stood out in my view, as getting customers faster on a release and finding reporting information is always valuable. But there are many more and SuccessFactors is certainly up to something here.
Intelligent Services– Another capability that SuccessFactors debuted last year, Intelligent Service – is seeing good uptake by customers, some executives even shared better uptake than they expected. Personally I am not surprised, as automating more repetitive tasks is something not only HR professionals but especially business users have been asking for a long time. The debate if Intelligent Services is ‘just workflow’ keeps going on, but at the end it does not matter what it can be labelled as from a taxonomy standpoint, what matters is that functionality provides day to day value for SuccessFactors users. And that was a question last year – by now from adoption and customer conversations there is no question anymore.
Performance Management keeps getting continuous– When SAP unveiled its plans to come up with a different approach to Performance Management, there was general surprise. After all, SuccessFactors is the ‘800-pound gorilla’ in Performance Management and gorillas are not know for disrupting themselves. So kudos for that to SuccessFactors, on the flipside the direction of a more continuous form of Performance Management is not in the league with e.g. Columbus finding America. But HR professionals don’t want risky discovery, but a solution to the inaptitude of current Performance Management, and the new SuccessFactors offering is working well in these regards. Also good to see that SuccessFactors did not rest and is building more capabilities into Performance Management.
Analyst Tidbits
- Payroll– Amongst the numerous announcement was also a payroll related one, that Accenture, EPI-USE and NGA HR would take a SAP customers payroll, ‘lift & shift’ it to their environments and have it run / managed from there. An interesting solution for customers who want to use the SAP cloud offerings, but not go through the risk and cost to re-implement a payroll. Pretty sure this will help SAP / SuccessFactors in one or the other competitive situation.
- Bias & Diversity– Back at Sapphire Thomas Otter and me recorded a video on how software can help eliminate bias and increase diversity (see here) – and now SAP is getting ready to release first product capabilities, starting with a resume parser that flags words that may be offensive or limiting candidate response due to bias or targeting only a slice of the candidate population. In combination with the new Investigate (see below) capability there will be also the functionality to analyze the workforce in regards of bias and diversity.
- Marketplace - It’s the biennial of the marketplaces, and SuccessFactors does not stand back, launching a training marketplace for its Learning product. A good start and an area where customers have requested more capabilities. Also a good place to show SAP wide benefits – as SuccessFactors leverage ‘sister division’ hybris capabilities. We will be curios on the uptake.
- Analytics– I have been critical of SAP’s analytics efforts overall and HCM in specific (see my definition of ‘true’ analytics here) – so it is good to see that things at SuccessFactors are changing for the better. Next to the new Report Center and the upcoming ‘Investigate’ capability, SuccessFactors has now a number of veritable predictive analytics projects ‘under the belt – which is a much better situation than a few quarters ago. We will have to see how yesterday’s SAP BW/HANA announcement may affect the reporting / analytics strategy for whole divisions like SuccessFactors (see our analysis here).
MyPOV
A good event for SuccessFactors that is growing on all fronts – customers, users, partners, prospects and most importantly product capability. Both SAP CEO Bill McDermott (with a first live appearance at the event) and Mike Ettling mentioned that the largest R&D contribution of SAP is in the HCM area. And with a focus on horizontal capabilities (e.g. User Interface and Reporting), the benefits are visible and delivered quickly. Also good to see that SuccessFactors has followed up on what they said they would deliver at the analyst summit earlier this year (Progress Report here). Moreover, it was good that this was not another ‘EmployeeCentral’ themed SuccessConnect – which for a long time has been the center of attention for good reasons, but almost to the point where traditional SuccessFactors clients on the older SuccessFactors products felt left out. A focus on overall HCM best practices has been good for the conference.On the concern side SAP must – like all vendors with a history in the enterprise software market – address the question of technical debt. Some of the acquired older SuccessFactors products are turning double digit if not teenage years old, always a point to rethink and possible rebuild products. At the same time SAP as a company overall is on the quest of rebuilding the suite with S/4HANA and that has repercussions on all product lines – that at least need to be answered (see the BW/HANA announcement happening in parallel). But that is not only a problem for SAP / SuccessFactors – nonetheless an area to watch.
Overall a good event, good to see activity and progress on all fronts. We also learnt that SAP has an ambitious partner agenda – that should drive EmployeeCentral customers to 2000 by end of the year – from a current base of 1200 and change. We will be watching, but for now congrats to SuccessFactors to a good event, showing value to customers across the SAP HCM capabilities.
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).
And more on SAP:
And more about SAP technology:
- Event Report - SAP Insider Vienna - HCP, BI and SuccessFactors are the takeaways - read here
- Event Report - SAP Sapphire 2016 - Top 3 Positives & Concerns: SAP changes - probably for the better - read here
- First Take - SAP Sapphire Day #2 Keynote - read here
- News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here
- First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
- Event Preview - SAP Sapphire 2016 - What to expect and look for - read here
- News Analysis - Apple & SAP Partner to Revolutionize Work on iPhone & iPad - read here
- Progress Report - SAP SuccessFactors makes good progress - now needs appeal beyond SAP - read here
- News Analysis - SAP HANA Vora now available... - A key milestone for SAP - read here
- Event Report - SAP Ariba Live - Make Procurement Cool Again - read here
- News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors innovates in Performance Management with continuous feedback powered by 1 to 1s - read here
- Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Good Progress sprinkled with innovative ideas and challenging the status quo - read here
- News Analysis - WorkForce Software Announces Global Reseller Agreement with SAP - read here
- First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Day #1 Keynote Top 3 Takeaways - read here
- News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors introduces Next Generation of HCM software - read here
- News Analysis - SAP delivers next release of SAP HANA - SPS 10 - Ready for BigData and IoT - read here
- Event Report - SAP Sapphire - Top 3 Positives and Concerns - read here
- First Take - Bernd Leukert and Steve Singh Day #2 Keynote - read here
- News Analysis - SAP and IBM join forces ... read here
- First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
- In Depth - S/4HANA qualities as presented by Plattner - play for play - read here
- First Take - SAP Cloud for Planning - the next spreadsheet killer is off to a good start - read here
- Progress Report - SAP HCM makes progress and consolidates - a lot of moving parts - read here
- First Take - SAP launches S/4HANA - The good, the challenge and the concern - read here
- First Take - SAP's IoT strategy becomes clearer - read here
- SAP appoints a CTO - some musings - read here
- Event Report - SAP's SAPtd - (Finally) more talk on PaaS, good progress and aligning with IBM and Oracle - read here
- News Analysis - SAP and IBM partner for cloud success - good news - read here
- Market Move - SAP strikes again - this time it is Concur and the spend into spend management - read here
- Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors picks up speed - but there remains work to be done - read here
- First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Top 3 Takeaways Day 1 Keynote - read here.
- Event Report - Sapphire - SAP finds its (unique) path to cloud - read here
- What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire - read here
- News Analysis - SAP becomes more about applications - again - read here
- Market Move - SAP acquires Fieldglass - off to the contingent workforce - early move or reaction? Read here.
- SAP's startup program keep rolling – read here.
- Why SAP acquired KXEN? Getting serious about Analytics – read here.
- SAP steamlines organization further – the Danes are leaving – read here.
- Reading between the lines… SAP Q2 Earnings – cloudy with potential structural changes – read here.
- SAP wants to be a technology company, really – read here
- Why SAP acquired hybris software – read here.
- SAP gets serious about the cloud – organizationally – read here.
- Taking stock – what SAP answered and it didn’t answer this Sapphire [2013] – read here.
- Act III & Final Day – A tale of two conference – Sapphire & SuiteWorld13 – read here.
- The middle day – 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
- A tale of 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
- What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire – read here.
- Why 3rd party maintenance is key to SAP’s and Oracle’s success – read here.
- Why SAP acquired Camillion – read here.
- Why SAP acquired SmartOps – read here.
- Next in your mall – SAP and Oracle? Read here
- Event Prieview - SAP TechEd 2015 - read here
- News Analysis - SAP Unveils New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop to Accelerate Digital Transformation – A key milestone for SAP read here
- HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS - read here
- News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenSource - key steps - but what is the direction? - Read here.
- News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step in a long journey - read here
- Launch Report - When BW 7.4 meets HANA it is like 2 + 2 = 5 - but is 5 enough - read here
- Event Report - BI 2014 and HANA 2014 takeaways - it is all about HANA and Lumira - but is that enough? Read here.
- News Analysis – SAP slices and dices into more Cloud, and of course more HANA – read here.
- SAP gets serious about open source and courts developers – about time – read here.
- My top 3 takeaways from the SAP TechEd keynote – read here.
- SAP discovers elasticity for HANA – kind of – read here.
- Can HANA Cloud be elastic? Tough – read here.
- SAP’s Cloud plans get more cloudy – read here.
- HANA Enterprise Cloud helps SAP discover the cloud (benefits) – read here
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.