Listen to my conversation with Dave Karel, VP of product marketing at SuccessFactors and Dave Willis, senior VP of marketing of Inform, recorded just after SuccessFactors announced its acquisition of Inform.
In this podcast, learn how Inform's analysis software helps companies understand more about how to motivate their best performers, and find out why SuccessFactors is likely to be making further acquisitions in the future.
Listen to or download the 8:56 minute podcast below:
---Transcript---
PW: I'm delighted to be here today with Dave Karel, VP of product marketing at SuccessFactors and Dave Willis, who's senior VP of marketing of Inform, which is the company that SuccessFactors has just announced the acquisition of. And that's two Daves. It's quite unusual to do a two-hander podcast, but it'll be interesting I'm sure. Welcome to both of you, and thanks for joining us today.
DK: Thanks Phil.
DW: Our pleasure.
Dave Willis, if I can start with you and ask you to tell me a little bit about Inform: the business it does, and what it brings into SuccessFactors that SuccessFactors didn't previously have in its product set?
DW: Yeah, I'm happy to do that. I think that for many of your listeners, yesterday's announcement may be the first time that they've actually heard of us. Inform is, or was until yesterday, a privately-held Australian company that has been around for about 28 years. We produce a software-as-a-service application that sits on top of other information systems that a company might have — an HRIS system, performance system, a financial system, an operational data system, a recruiting system, what have you.
We extract data from those systems and integrate them into a reporting and analytics and planning platform that organizations can use to get very sophisticated answers to critical business questions. Such as: what's the relationship between high performers in different businesses, and the actual financial and operational performance of those businesses; or what recruiting sources do I draw most of my best performers from? Questions that for many organizations are very difficult to answer because the data resides in many different sources. Our application enables them to get very quick and very sophisticated answers to those questions.
So bringing that strength — that goodness, if you will — to SuccessFactors was the real driving force behind the acquisition for us. It was the opportunity to take what we do and then the way that we work with our clients worldwide, and bring it to SuccessFactors' global employee base of about 3,000 customers — and hopefully, accelerate our growth, but also accelerate the SuccessFactors vision of being the business execution platform.
And so really what you're talking about is taking quite sophisticated analysis of what's going on in an organization and presenting that in a way that helps people make more sense of how their people are performing and how to help them perform better.
DW: Yeah, I think that's a very good, succinct description of it. We would say we help organizations make better business decisions by providing them with an easy-to-use platform with which they can access and integrate all of this great data that otherwise is sitting around not talking to each other.
And that's actually a classic SaaS play in a sense, isn't it? To be able to come in, sit on top of all of the other systems in a very light, loosely coupled way and actually bring the information together.
DW: That's exactly right. And I think one of the things that's important, that differentiates what Inform does from other more traditional, more business-intelligence type platforms, is that it's not just extracting a technology. The application itself is built on our 30-year history of experience in workforce analytics and workforce planning. So it is designed to be able to answer very sophisticated questions and inquiries that we know would tend to lead to really important nuggets of knowledge that drive individual organization performance.
So Dave Karel from SuccessFactors, if I can come to you now, can you give me a little bit more context around why the customers that you're signing up for SuccessFactors now are going to find this extra functionality useful?
DK: Sure, Phil. You know it really comes down to the value that our customers are securing from SuccessFactors today, our primary focus: which really is around addressing the biggest challenge that our customers face today, which is how to execute more effectively on their strategies. And with Inform, with the kind of things that Dave Willis describes that we bring to the table, what we're able to do is, introduce to our customers a very sophisticated technology and content — intellectual property — around planning.
And what this really means, when you get down to it: it's going to be able to help our customers, our SuccessFactors customers, readily assess their readiness to execute, by ensuring their investments in the workforce — whether it's near term investments, long-term investments — ensuring that those investments are connected to the strategy, right, and be able to clearly understand the financial implications of those investments. And that's really what workforce planning, the vision around workforce planning really is. And you marry that with Business Execution Suite that we have and there's a lot of power to that.
Dave Willis talked about the analysis that we're able to surface to make better decisions. It's really around predictive insights, and that's also what we're going to be able to deliver to our customers.
Oh right. So it's not just looking back at how people have performed, but it's also doing forecasting as to how people might perform if you do this — sort of doing what-if analysis on your recruitment and succession strategy.
DK: Exactly. In the Inform system, no one is better than Inform at correlating people data, operational data, financial data; and turning it into answers to guide the right decision. They can help customers answer [these] kind of questions: for example, if I were to increase compensation by ten percent, would that help me increase retention of my top performers by 20 percent, and what would that mean to the organization? I think if you asked most executives, what would that mean to your business, if you knew that you could increase marginally compensation to increase retention of your best people, I think they'd all tone in that it would mean a heck of a lot.
Right. Yes, that's an interesting example. So now, what I also wanted to — because this is the first acquisition that SuccessFactors has made, as a company, isn't it?
DK: That's correct.
So what I wanted to ask also was, what you think is going to happen in the industry that you operate in. Because I think performance management and people management is quite fragmented, there's quite a few vendors out there. How you do think the different types of products are going to start to coalesce together?
DK: You know, I think it's a good question. We truly feel this is an industry-redefining move, a game-changing move. All of these fragmented — you talked about the fragmented market of the various vendors that are helping to support these challenges in different ways. In the end of the day, if it's not connected to the business, then these initiatives are going to have marginal impact.
What we at SuccessFactors — our vision — and really, from the founding day, where we were founding applications for goal management, which was helping to align people with what matters, and our performance management application at the time, which is how do you optimize the performance of the people to support strategy — and we built out our suite against that vision.
I think what happens with Inform, and the combination of Inform and SuccessFactors, is that vision really has truly an opportunity to accelerate that vision. When we announced our expanded strategy around business execution back in September of last year, we defined — and the analysts are defining — this market to be about a $36 billion opportunity. I think fundamentally the combination of SuccessFactors and Inform will allow us to accelerate our ability to address a larger set of these unmet customer needs, challenges that are not yet being comprehensively addressed by the technology, to secure a bigger part of that market.
And do you think that we're going to see additional acquisitions by SuccessFactors in the future? Do you see yourselves expanding your footprint further? Not necessarily expanding the footprint because in some sense it's deepening it as well isn't it? But is there scope to do more do you think?
DK: Absolutely. I think we've been very methodical. As you know Phil, we've developed — it's started, this being our first acquisition. We've built our entire suite organically from the ground up here at the company, so we have a fairly high bar for the kind of companies, or technologies, or intellectual property if you will, that we would look to acquire. We have that set of criteria that are important to us in seeking acquisitions and Inform, fortunately, met all the criteria. So we will definitely look to — you know we raised a follow-on offering a few months back, end of last year, and that is to allow us to go very strategically to look for the kind of combinations that would allow us to get closer to securing these business execution visions for our customers.
Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that develops. So thank you both very much.
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