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SuccessFactors Selects CloudFoundry As Custom Application Development Platform

By Krishnan Subramanian on October 17, 2011

Successfactors, the business execution software company, has selected CloudFoundry (previous CloudAve coverage), VMWare’s PaaS offering, as the platform to develop custom applications for their customers. With 3500 customers and their 15 Million employees, this is a big win for CloudFoundry to show that they are a strong enterprise PaaS player. As more and more enterprises move to the cloud based applications, a PaaS offering like CloudFoundry is the right solution for integration needs. This move by Successfactors further legitimizes what I have been advocating here regarding the future of cloud services.

Successfactors has set up an example application to showcase how CloudFoundry can help their customers. As noted in CloudFoundry blog,

SuccessFactors has deployed a simple sample application (http://sfsf.cloudfoundry.com) that gives a sense of what is possible. The application integrates SuccessFactors’ employee location data with Google Maps to calculate the impact of a facilities move.

This news is interesting because:

  • This highlights the fact that enterprise PaaS is real and it is here to stay
  • Even though I have said many times that VMForce, the partnership between VMware and Salesforce, is dead, this news once again establishes the fact that VMware is competing head to head with Force.com (a fact noted by my friend and fellow Clouderati Ben Kepes on Twitter)
  • There is a meme going around the cloud blogosphere and media on how PaaS is going to kill SaaS and this announcement could feed the meme because PaaS could end up serving the 9custom) application needs of enterprise than SaaS

I usually don’t highlight single customer wins but since I am strongly advocating PaaS here in this blog, I wanted to use this news to highlight (once again) how PaaS is going to dominate the enterprise space in the coming years. Watch out folks.

PS: While on the topic of CloudFoundry, I want to highlight another news Nimbula adds support for CloudFoundry. This is especially interesting because this adds support for auto-scaling and auto-discovery which is lacking in CloudFoundry open source code.

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Research Analyst And Editor
Krishnan Subramanian (a.k.a Krish) is the Principal Analyst of Rishidot Research LLC. His main focus areas include Cloud Infrastructure and Platforms while he also focusses on the big picture where the seemingly disparate technologies of cloud computing, mobile, social and big data converge to change IT in ways we can't even imagine today. Krish also evangelizes Open Source and Cloud Computing on various media outlets, public speaking and blogs. Rishidot Research offer research reports and advisory services for enterprises and IT vendors. More information can be found here. Krish's personal website can be found here.

3 responses to “SuccessFactors Selects CloudFoundry As Custom Application Development Platform”

  1. M Sri
    M Sri October 18, 2011 at 2:33 pm |

    “With 3500 customers and their 15 Million employees,…” did you intent to say 15 million subscribers? Would be great for the economy if successfactors can employ so many millions!

    1. Krishnan Subramanian
      Krishnan Subramanian October 18, 2011 at 3:21 pm |

      I am talking about Successfactors customers and their employees

  2. Larry Cable
    Larry Cable December 7, 2011 at 9:36 am |

    I’m curious just what this announcement actually “means” … are SF deploying their SaaS on VMWare’s CloudFoundry PaaS/IaaS, are they adopting CF technologies for their own platform internally, or are they simply creating a PaaS solution, deployable on CF that enables 3rd parties to “call into” SF SaaS???