 |
| Image via Wikipedia |
Still, the news of them being acquired by Salesforce.com is quite unexpected !
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is one of the champions of "The Social Enterprise" buying firms like social media monitoring tool Radian6 and now Rypple. With Rypple Salesforce.com makes its biggest move to becoming something more than just Sales. Using Salesforce's Chatter (which is similar to Yammer) employees can already connect and share information and now with Rypple their clients will do Talent Management socially, for managing goals, giving feedback and socially rewarding people.
The fact that this has happened barely two weeks after SAP acquired SuccessFactors (which itself was acquiring some social firms) and it is clear that cloud and social HR are critical to the large ERP players.
Perhaps because their users are more bothered about HR than they were in 2000?
The other thought that crossed my mind is that Salesforce.com now competes directly with the social business players like Jive (which just had a good IPO) and Lithium. Rypple is available on the Jive App Market. I wonder what happens now? (Update: Constellation analyst Alan Lepofsky shares that they will continue as usual, which is good news)
Exciting times ahead, folks!
