Google Apps Marketplace Gets WorkSimple Social Goals App

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.