WorkSimple, a social goal performance tool that competes with SuccessFactors and Rypple, is now available from the Google Apps Marketplace.
WorkSimple,
a startup in a performance management space that is heating up, has seeded its
Free Forever goal performance application in the Google Apps Marketplace, the
search engine's online store for apps that hook into Google Apps.
WorkSimple
competes with SuccessFactors and Rypple, both of which have been acquired by
larger companies seeking to improve their portfolios of Web-based software for
human resource professionals.
SAP (NYSE:SAP) last December agreed to pay $3.4
billion for SuccessFactors, which has large customers such as Siemens AG, 20th
Century Fox and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Salesforce.com
(NYSE:CRM), which competes with giant enterprise application vendors SAP and
Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL),
purchased Rypple for an undisclosed sum in December.
WorkSimple's
Free Forever app helps small-to-large work teams share goals, and get and give
feedback. The software is used by soup, salad and sandwich shop Panera Bread to
help employees create goals and make them a collaborative process within the
company chain.
The way the
app works within the Google Apps Marketplace is that managers can fully load
their company or team with a single click, allowing everyone in the group to
leverage the company's social goals, suggested goals, feedback, teams, activity
streams and notifications tools.
WorkSimple CEO
and co-founder Morgan Norman told
eWEEK
his company is predicated on enabling employees to remember, log and track all their
goals within an organization.
Yet while
market leader SuccessFactors starts with the premise that employees' goals must
be kept private, WorkSimple takes the public tack, Norman explained.
Also, unlike
SuccessFactors and Rypple, which require management insight to create a goal,
WorkSimple goal creation and setting happens by the individual employee.
Managers can,
of course, suggest goals (as is their wont) within WorkSimple. Generally,
anyone in a goal-setting organization can comment on the stated goals.
WorkSimple's
freewheeling approach might seem to be unappealing to major entities that
closely guard such HR data, but Norman said three government agencies recently
came calling.
Norman is
under no illusion about the nature of his business, which has recently turned
very acquisitive.
He concedes
there is a better-than-average chance that WorkSimple could get snapped up by a
larger vendor in need of Web-based human resource and employee performance
tools.
Until such
time, if it comes, it will be business as usual. To wit, WorkSimple, whose Ruby on Rails-based platform runs
atop Engine Yard's platform as a service infrastructure (PaaS), also recently
launched focus boards.
Focus boards are visual dashboards that display a
snapshot of all goal activity aligned to team or company focus.
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