I have always thought that the folks at SuccessFators, a HRMS, got social media marketing. They've had an external facing blog for a long time and have also linked to this blog in the past :-)
So was quite interested to see that they had acquired CubeTree. More and more traditional ERP systems are going to go the social way methinks.
As I have said before - ERP is the interpretation of business processes while enterprise social networking is an interpretation of business relationships. Both need each other to be organizationally relevant. My view is that we'll see a lot more ERP and social networking providers to connect and build partnerships - or to buy out the complementary offering.
See related story here: SuccessFactors Adds Social Features to Business Drivers
So was quite interested to see that they had acquired CubeTree. More and more traditional ERP systems are going to go the social way methinks.
As I have said before - ERP is the interpretation of business processes while enterprise social networking is an interpretation of business relationships. Both need each other to be organizationally relevant. My view is that we'll see a lot more ERP and social networking providers to connect and build partnerships - or to buy out the complementary offering.
See related story here: SuccessFactors Adds Social Features to Business Drivers
SuccessFactors recently hopped on the social train via their recent acquisition of CubeTree, which adds free collaboration capabilities to its SaaS BizX Suite of business applications.
We covered a bit of CubeTree back the spring of 2009 when enterprise collaboration was on its way to becoming an official buzz term. With features like microblogging, wikis and profiles in the CubeTree arsenal, the company was winning the hearts of people like investor Mitch Kapor, who said: “At work, e-mail and IM are still the dominant online communications media. I believe that is destined to change with products like CubeTree, which help companies create enterprise social networks. I invested in CubeTree because I believe that social networking technology will be at the heart of the next generation of enterprise collaboration.”
Could he have been more right? Today, enterprise-level companies like Salesforce.com have seemingly put all of their eggs in the social media basket, and are doing quite well.
Presently, CubeTree offers even more social features than before, including:
Status Updates
Like Twitter, CubeTree's status updates are public, 140 characters messages that tell your co-workers what's up:
cubetree_status_update.jpg
Comments
Activities within the CubeTree system generate feed items that can be commented on by colleagues, just like a Facebook wall generates links to activities you perform on linked sites like YouTube and Flickr:
cubetree_comments.jpg
Feed Filtering
Also like Facebook, CubeTree Uusers can choose who they want to follow, as well as which types of feed items they want to receive. If there are particular feed items a user does not want to receive from people they follow, there is a setting to filter them out.
Further, you can integrate third-party applications like Twitter and Google Docs so that your co-workers know what you're up to not only at work, but everywhere else, too.
SuccessFactors + CubeTree
SuccessFactors provides what they call "Business Execution Software" (BizX), which aims to help organizations maximize business results. With the CubeTree integraion, the BizX sweet now offers all of the CubeTree social goodness mentioned above, as well as:
Automatic Synchronization: Employees can start collaborating immediately without waiting for colleagues to accept invitations; automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of users; increases the findability of relevant colleagues to follow and build robust social graphs
Single Sign-On: Employees sign in only once to access their BizX dashboard, social networking and collaboration capabilities
Global Cloud Infrastructure: The enterprise social and collaboration capabilities from CubeTree will run in SuccessFactors’ global cloud computing infrastructure
“Poor communication gets in the way of execution,” said Dmitri Krakovsky, vice president of global product management, SuccessFactors. “With activity feeds and collaboration features incorporated into our Business Execution Suite, we help solve this information flow problem and fundamentally change the way companies work. When every person across the company can share and collaborate with one another, that’s when real work gets done.”
