3.0 Social Learning, Video Mobile Platform Acquisition by SuccessFactors
Jambok acquisition will add mobile video creation and sharing technology to accelerate the future of corporate social learning and the smarter workplace
SAN MATEO, Calif., March 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- SuccessFactors, Inc. (Nasdaq: SFSF) has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jambok (http://www.jambok.com), the SaaS social learning company that draws on the consumer world's popular web 2.0 tools like YouTube and Facebook, to offer even easier next generation on-the-fly mobile video creation, sharing, discovery and social networking that enables informal social learning within the workforce.
"We think Jambok has superior next gen mobile video and social learning technology. Jambok has surprisingly great growth and customers like NIKE, Mitsubishi, and Reuters. We love the team; Karie is a visionary learning practitioner and published bestselling domain thought leader, and Charles and the engineering team from Russia are exceptional," said Lars Dalgaard, CEO and founder of SuccessFactors. "We all know 80 percent of learning happens on the job, Jambok-SuccessFactors allows any employee to immediately capture and accelerate that business execution opportunity, in a mobile social learning video. I personally found it easier than YouTube, and with the Social Learning platform it feels like a killer app for businesses to accelerate learning content and dissemination. SuccessFactors has found customers want to buy traditional integrated learning but delivered as part of SuccessFactors' BizX Cloud Suite, and the Jambok technology will form a customer proven fresh Social Learning compliment to differentiate learning management in the BizX Suite.
"By solving a much larger comprehensive opportunity of making employees productive, not only on regulatory compliance, we intend to grow our expanding learning offerings faster than the market," Dalgaard continued.
"At NIKE most of our learning happens on the job, in real-time and from the subject matter experts, not from canned videos and training alone," said Joe Campbell, director of talent development & global design and delivery solutions, NIKE. "Jambok allows our team members, regardless of their technological capabilities, to complete screen captures, create videos, upload and share easily with the team, accelerating learning and helping to create a smarter workforce. This is the future of corporate learning and we're ahead of the curve with Jambok."
Although companies based in the U.S. alone spend more than $100B per year on training, the ability to tap into the informal learning that happens on the job is limited, and the power of user-generated content remains untapped. With this acquisition, SuccessFactors makes a significant step forward in defining the next generation of results-oriented learning for organizations.
This acquisition will extend SuccessFactors' leadership in Business Execution software with strong new social video creation and sharing tools that will be integrated into the company's current social collaboration offering as well as other areas of the Business Execution (BizX) Suite, including social recruiting. Through its acquisitions over the past year, SuccessFactors has continued to build on its core BizX solution to help its customers' workforce be more productive and to execute effectively against company strategy.
Adding Jambok technology to the BizX suite will offer customers:
- Content Creation & Sharing: Simple and easy tools to share existing multimedia files, documents, videos and/or audio content through a webcam, as well as capture narrated screen casts. Instantly publish with one-click to the community using a web browser on your computer or mobile device.
- User-centric Social Capabilities: Powerful features including user-generated ratings of content, user-assigned taxonomy applied to content, user-based feedback on content, granular content sorting capabilities and content filtering.
- Community-based Approach: Flexible and secure targeting of content for specific groups of users based on topic, interest or projects.
The Jambok team will join SuccessFactors, including Dr. Karie Willyerd, CEO of Jambok, who will join as vice president of learning and social adoption. Willyerd is an industry veteran and the former chief learning officer for Sun Microsystems, where she led a team that won more than 30 awards from 2008 through 2010, including the ASTD No. 1 training department in the world. She is also the co-author of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today (http://www.amazon.com/2020-Workplace-Innovative-Companies-Tomorrows/dp/0061763276/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1300079826&sr=1-1).
"The Jambok team is extremely passionate about our social learning solutions. Our customers have seen early success in accelerating the learning curve by allowing their employees to generate and share content with each other. Jambok makes it simple and easy to post video, audio, bookmarks, photos, as well as screen capture their desktops in order to share knowledge within the organization," said Dr. Karie Willyerd, CEO of Jambok. "Joining the SuccessFactors family will give us the momentum and network needed to continue to grow, expand and instantly reach additional customers with our solution."
The acquisition is expected to close by Tuesday, March 15, 2011.
About SuccessFactors
SuccessFactors is the leading provider of cloud-based Business Execution (BizX) software solutions to organizations of all sizes, with more than 8 million users across multiple industries and geographies. We strive to delight our customers by delivering innovative solutions, a broad range of content, process expertise and best practices knowledge gained from serving our large and varied customer base. Today, we have more than 3,200 customers in more than 168 countries using our application suite in 34 languages.
Execution Is The Difference™
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About Jambok
Jambok is a social learning platform that unlocks knowledge, expertise and ideas to make the workplace smarter. Designed by award-winning learning professionals, Jambok draws on the consumer world's popular web 2.0 tools like YouTube and Facebook, and goes beyond them to offer easy content creation, sharing, discovery and social networking combined with community management services to enable workplace communities. Jambok fits into any learning or collaboration environment and includes video and podcasting, discussion forums, blogs, and activity feeds, all supported by rich social searching and analytics in a secure, affordable, Software-as-a-Service platform.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONcQWKdHJ7c
"Safe harbor" statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are SuccessFactors' current expectations and beliefs.
These forward-looking statements include statements about future growth prospects and benefits of the acquisitions. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements include: our ability to retain customers and to experience high customer renewal rates; whether customers renew their agreements for additional modules or users; pricing pressures; the uncertain impact of the overall global economic conditions, including on customers, prospective customers and partners, renewal rates and length of sales cycles; the fact that the business execution market is at an early stage of development, and may not develop as rapidly as we anticipate; risks related to the integration of the acquisition, including integrating acquired technology and potential unknown liabilities, retaining key personnel, and managing geographically-dispersed operations; competitive factors; outages or security breaches; market acceptance of, the products of Jambok; the impact of any discovered product defects or outages; our ability to continue to sell our services outside the HR area; our ability to manage our growth; our ability to successfully expand our sales force and its effectiveness; whether our resellers and other partners will be successful in marketing our products; our ability to continue to manage expenses; the impact of unforeseen expenses, including as a result of integrating acquisitions; and general economic conditions worldwide. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions proves incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make.
Further information on these and other factors that could affect these forward-looking statements is included in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and in our most recent report on Form 10-Q and in other filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.
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SOURCE SuccessFactors, Inc.
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