A mere six weeks after closing the acquisition of human capital management cloud service provider Rypple, Web services giant Salesforce.com on March 15 launched the integration of the service into its rapidly expanding social enterprise suite.
The announcement was made at CloudForce, Salesforce’s annual developers’ conference held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Salesforce also announced the launch of Site.com, a new service that enables enterprises to run their own corporate Websites on the Salesforce platform.
Rypple makes a goal-setting application that helps human resources managers give employees feedback about how they’re performing in their positions. The software is used by Facebook, Gilt Groupe, Mozilla and Rackspace, among other high-profile customers; it is accessed from within internal social networks.
Such software, which greases the human capital management (HCM) wheels for companies, is becoming increasingly popular, especially provisioned through a Web browser as Rypple offers it. For example, enterprise application giant SAP bought cloud-based HCM specialist SuccessFactors last November for $3.4 billion, and Oracle picked up Taleo for $1.9 billion on Feb. 9.
‘Unstoppable Demand’ for Social Enterprise Tools
“Salesforce.com is seeing unstoppable demand for the social enterprise as companies see their customers and employees become more social and mobile by the day,” Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff (pictured) told developers at Cloudforce. “With Salesforce Rypple and Site.com, companies will now be able to extend their social enterprise to reach every employee and every customer.”
Rypple enables managers and employees alike to form workgroups via Salesforce’s Chatter social network, collaborate on planning, keep each other apprised of the progress of projects and pat each other on the back as needed. It uses “merit badges” for managers and employees to award each other to recognize accomplishments, which then can be viewed by the entire company or by selected groups or individuals.
HR specialists and managers know that peer encouragement is a huge motivating factor for employees, especially in the sales and marketing sectors.
Rypple focuses heavily on providing the platform for those types of interactions. In this manner, the combination of Salesforce Rypple and Chatter will help break down departmental silos and provide management with visibility into key contributions, all within the employee social network.
The software also keeps track of internal information, such as performance reviews, hiring and firing, salaries and other confidential HR duties.
Site.com Houses Enterprise Websites
Salesforce Site.com integrates enterprise Websites into existing Salesforce environments, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Force.com custom apps and the underlying common Database.com. The idea is to enable the use all of the available resources within Salesforce to bolster outside sites and expose them to the Chatter social network. Today, leading brands such as FICO, The Häagen-Dazs Shoppe Company and Hewlett-Packard are already publishing sites using Salesforce Site.com. Key features include:
- Template-driven sites: Template-driven styling ensures the brand experience is consistent across Websites and public social networks, including Facebook. By making it easy to update styling in one place, Salesforce Site.com allows marketers to be consistent.
- Drag-and-drop forms: With dynamic data-binding, Salesforce Site.com turns sites into highly scalable marketing machines, with drag-and-drop forms and data-driven pages that are integrated to Force.com and all Salesforce data.
- Built-in collaboration with Chatter: Salesforce Site.com users can now connect with R&D, sales, Web developers and even external entities, such as creative agencies and design firms using Chatter. Open collaboration through the content-development process makes sure the right message is delivered.
- Multi-language: Salesforce Site.com can localize and publish Websites and content on an integrated content delivery network. Marketers can now scale their message globally, and in multiple languages.
Pricing and Availability
Salesforce Rypple became generally available March 15. Pricing starts at $5 USD, per user, per month. Rypple integration for Salesforce is scheduled to become available in April at no additional cost for paying Rypple customers. Customers will be able to install the app from the AppExchange.
Site.com became generally available March 15. Site.com charges per site and per Website developer user, with the price of a site starting at $1,500 USD per month. Salesforce Site.com can be purchased stand-alone or added to existing salesforce.com installations. Publisher and contributor users are an additional $125 USD and $20 USD, respectively, per month.
Site.com is having a sale of sorts for the next several weeks. Through April 30, 2012, customers can buy a Site.com service that includes two publishers, two contributors and one published site at the price of $825 USD per month.
Chris Preimesberger is eWEEK Editor of Features and Analysis. Twitter: editingwhiz