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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“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!
I am talking about Successfactors customers and their employees
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???