On demand CRM provider Salesforce.com has announced its intention to buy human capital management (HMC) software-as-a-service provider Rypple for an undisclosed amount.
Founded in 2008 by John Wookey, a veteran of both Oracle and SAP, Toronto-based Rypple counts companies including Facebook and Spotify among its customers.
Rypple’s system uses what it calls ‘social goals’, employing social media-like functionality to display an employee’s performance and achievements. This chimes with Salesforce.com’s current focus on technologies for "the social enterprise".
"The next generation of HCM is not just about a cloud delivery model," said Marc Benioff, salesforce.com CEO. "It’s about a fundamentally better way to recruit, manage and empower employees in a social world."
In seeming reference to SAP’s recent acquisition of SuccessFactors, another SaaS HCM provider, Salesforce said it will change Rypple’s name to ‘Successforce’. Wookey will helm the new business unit.
The market for HCM applications is unusual in that it is dominated by software-as-a-service companies, in part because they use a peripheral dataset to core, on premise applications. The acquisition of SuccessFactors by SAP and Rypple by Salesforce.com represent not only the assimilation of the HCM market, but also the consolidation of the SaaS industry.
