Established in 2002, Socialtext, a Bedford Funding portfolio company (which also owns Peoplefluent), was one of the first companies to deliver social networking software to businesses. Socialtext’s enterprise social networking products—including microblogging, blogs, wikis, profiles, and social spreadsheets—provide more efficient and simpler ways for employees to share vital information and work together in real-time. Delivered in the cloud or securely behind the firewall as an appliance, Socialtext customers can be provided with flexible deployment options that meet their security requirements.

After the recent partnership with Badgeville for gamification capabilities, this week Socialtext announced its distribution partnership with Winvale, one of the premier government-focused solutions providers in the United States. After multi-year success implementing the Socialtext software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with government agencies, the offering will now be available through Winvale’s General Services Administration (GSA) Schedules.

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Part 1 of this series introduced SuccessFactors, a public provider of software as a service (SaaS) talent management solutions. The article first analyzed the vendor’s evolution from its traditional People Performance realm to the seemingly more opportune Business Execution (BizX) province.

Then the article talked about SuccessFactors’ diverse product editions (tailored to satisfy companies of all sizes) and detailed the two core modules of the SuccessFactors BizX suite of applications: Performance Management and Goal Management. These two modules serve as the foundation for the BizX application suite, since visibility into employee performance and organizational goals form the necessary basis for other talent management activities.

Part 2 then analyzed additional BizX modules (i.e., recruiting, learning & development, compensation, and succession planning), some nice-to-have capabilities, and the most recent developments, such as the 2010 tuck-in acquisitions of Inform, CubeTree, and YouCalc. 

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Analyst Analogy   

In the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise’s character—a workaholic sports agent—decides that he’s had enough of trying to sign as many athletes as possible with his “show me the money” attitude and opts instead for fewer athletes on his roster where he will create a more “personal relationship” with them. He decides to write what he calls his “mission statement”—hoping the other sports agents in his organization will follow suit with his idea. Instead he gets fired!

The point I’m trying to make here is that Jerry felt that if he proposed this idea to others like him (those in his chosen field), that it would resonate well with the others and that he could make a “difference” in the way they do business. This is what I plan to accomplish with this blog; make a difference to our readers by merely suggesting (through a mission statement of sorts) to find more time for the things that really matter.

So here’s “my mission statement”—the miniature version that is. Hopefully it won’t find me packing up my personal belongings once it gets published. Read the rest of this entry »

Boy, we have come a long way in the search for talent. Long gone are the days where company’s would place an advertisement in the classified ad section of their local newspaper’s and wait for the perfect candidate to call and request an interview—although some organizations today feel this is still a very effective recruiting method and often use it in conjunction with other channels.

Today, it’s more about what I like to call “cyber recruiting”—using social media tools for attracting and finding the right person to fill a job. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter are some of the main social media tools used by today’s forward-thinking organizations and allow recruiters to target the exact skill sets required for often difficult-to- fill positions. Candidates that were once far beyond the recruiter’s reach are now right there at their fingertips. Read the rest of this entry »

As 2009 comes to a close, we look forward to the New Year and everything trendy that it will bring. Today, TEC’s Research Analyst Round Table discusses the outlook in technology for 2010. We will touch on:

•    Social Networking
•    Social Product Development
•    Business Intelligence (BI) for the Masses
•    Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
•    Software Integration vs. Niche Players
•    Mobile Commerce (M-commerce)

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