mployee: Betting the farm on Salesforce

I first heard about mployee (www.mployee.nl / @mployee) at the Salesforce Customer Company Tour and was thrilled to hear they had developed a comprehensive Talent Management suite on the  Salesforce  platform.

It's a brilliant idea. As Salesforce will be the first to tell you - developers choosing the  salesforce.com  platform will shave years of development time - but more importantly - not have to worry about the elephants in the room when selling in the enterprise market; security, reliability and scalability - and increasingly the quality of your API.

Salesforce apps inherit the above, so where other vendors have to prove their viability, that job has pretty much already been done for mployee, and they surely benefit from the market exposure they get through the app exchange and the Salesforce community.

So by rethinking their deveelopment platform mployee has carved out an attractive niche in the market and built an application with plenty of scope for growth and innovation.

What's the big idea?

mployee bet the farm on PAAS, specifically Salesforce. They are all in, building their solution as a native Salesforce application.

Where's the ROI?

The economic loss that follow hundreds of HCM vendors developing and running their own development stacks is mind-boggling. Too much attention must typically be paid to infrastructure by the many would-be innovative HCM vendors of the world.

For current Salesforce.com customers mployee's value proposition is obvious – it is pretty much plug and play integrated talent management. If I was a Salesforce shop I would struggle to even consider non-native alternatives if I was looking for a comprehensive talent management solution.

My two cents
More than anything mployee’s choice of platform suggests that Salesforce is the best PAAS solution in the market for HCM. Mployee is not alone about their choice of platform - Vana and Fairsail also offer native HCM suites in the Salesforce app exchange, alongside a growing number of best of breed apps. It is the beginnings of an ecosystem. All is not great with the Salesforce.com HCM ecosystem however.

Gartner Group PAAS analyst Yefim Natis  says about Salesforce that some “… see its ecosystem as incomplete due to the strong focus on CRM applications”.

In that case, Salesforce has, at the very least – a brand problem. They’re called Salesforce. Not much hint of HCM orientation there. They pledge their commitment to HCM through integrating with Oracle and Workday – but that’s something very different to becoming the ecosystem of choice for HCM (or is it?)

For mployee and any other HCM tech vendor making the bet on Salesforce this is both the challenge and the opportunity.

Why should you care?
If you build and sell customer-facing technology you know Salesforce is the center in your universe. If you build HCM applications you cannot really know for sure. mployee shows you can make a bet on Salesforce. If you go another way – as a buyer or seller of HCM solutions - you may be right – but you’d better be able to explain yourself.