SuccessFactors Extend Its Enterprise Capabilities Through CubeTree Acquistion

I have written about CubeTree several times. The most recent was Cubetree engages its user community in product development. I also met a number of their executives at the last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference so I was interested to learn that they have recently been acquired by SuccessFactors, another firm I have covered (see SuccessFactors: Bringing Web 2.0 to Talent Management). SuccessFactors is one of the world’s most widely deployed cloud-based business solutions. It is used by more than 8 million people within over 3,000 companies.

Recently, I spoke with Carlin Wiegner, the CubeTree CEO, about the impact of this acquisition and how CubeTree will fit within SuccessFactors.  First, he said that this move is opening a many more doors for them given the large installed base, new use cases in areas such as learning, and a larger sales force that SuccessFactors offers.  There is also great synergy between the two offerings. SuccessFactors has recently broadened their offering with the BizX performance management system that offers more robust support for knowledge workers.

The addition of Cubetree can take this BizX support to the next level with its many collaboration features. Individuals can quickly create rich profiles and begin engaging with others in their organization to get work done, find co-workers who can help, and share insights as they happen. Teams can make use of workspaces that enable groups to immediately gather around a project, collaborate, share documents and perform work tasks. Ciubetree also provides executive dashboards that offer insights into how a company is executing on a day-to-day basis. 

CubeTree will remain a separate brand as SucessFactors wanted CubeTree’s capabilities to both extend its own offerings and as an independent, but well aligned, offering.  For example, the SuccessFactor employee profile will now have CubeTree’s related communication and collaboration activities embedded within it.  Other aspects of CubeTree will findtheir way into the appropriate SuccessFactors offerings. The CubeTree micro-blogging feature will be embedded within SuccessFactors but also remain a separate free offering. 

Below is a sample screen from the micro-blogging feature. In this case you see a status update "in progress" where an employee is letting his co-workers know that he has wrapped up his current project and where he will be if they need him for the rest of the day. The CubeTree micro-blogging capability also integrates with Twitter. Below we see the same employee sending a notice about the release notes post to a customer who had a question about new features in this weeks release. By adding a custom hash tag (#cubetree) to his Twitter update it is posted to his CubeTree feed. He then adds a comment back that he is pushing it live on the blog.

CubeTree provides micro-blogging as a free feature and the other capabilities comes in a commercial package. I think this is a smart move as micro-blogging is the perfect way to introduce your offerings within an enterprise. It is easy to install and does not require integration with business process to obtain initial benefits. It can then be spread virally throughout an enterprise to quickly demonstrate value.

I also asked Carlin about what new features that CubeTree has introduced since our last conversation. They do frequent releases for continuous improvement but one of the main areas they have focused on is more robust email integration. CubeTree can work with any email client as it is not a plug in. Instead it sends messages that appear to the email client like any other message. This allows users to stay within email for many CubeTree activities. You can also have very robust email alert settings that can be easily turned on and off. Below you can see some of the robust email settings.

To complement the email integration there is also very robust mobile capabilities. Below you can see a message on a mobile device. The user is replying to an instant notification and posting it back to CubeTree

I like this combination as SuccessFactors and CubeTree nicely complement each other without bring redundancies to sort out.  Carlin said they sorted through several possible mergers. I do not know the other possibilities but I think they made a good choice.