Willkommen in Frankfurt (Welcome to Frankfurt)!
SuccessConnect 2010 kicked off today in the beautiful city of Frankfurt, our final SuccessConnect destination for 2010.

The event started with a bang with the ever energetic, Lars Dalgaard taking the stage. Announcing the acquisition of YouCalc, a Danish company, to a jam packed house, Lars explained how SuccessFactors latest purchase will let business create and share custom reports and analytics from the cloud.

Jay Larson, SuccessFactors Head of Sales, was next up to the podium. Jay discussed HR’s new economic reality – do more with less: more ROI; greater business impact; connect HR with the business; and close the gap between strategy and execution. He then went on to share success stories from those who have implemented more for less and have “BizX’ed” their organizations.

Dmitri Krakovsky drilled further into SuccessFactors recent YouCalc acquisition explaining the new Calculator in the Cloud feature that will allow users to perform analytic mash-ups and what-if scenarios from any cloud based application. Dmitri also expressed his excitement over SuccessFactors new partnership with Jobvite, pointing out that the time to hire is not as important as hiring the best.
The final SuccessConnect of the year showcased the best of the best with Norbert Kleinjohann, CIO Siemens AG and Marion Horstmann, Corporate Vice President of HR, Siemens AG sharing their secrets for success.

Marion Horstmann shared Siemens transformation of the HR function using a global people strategy of which transparency was a key element. Marion expressed her delight that her three requirements for a strong HR strategy were inherently delivered via SuccessFactors solutions: integrated applications for all people processes; a uniform product completely that speaks in a single global language; and recurring efficiency and higher quality.

Norbert Kleinjohann then went on to discuss how Siemens positioned their standard HR system, labeled 4Success, for success. “During the evaluation process, Siemens IT team worked with their HR colleagues to assess 50 possible suppliers, both on premise and in the Cloud. We awarded the contract to SuccessFactors in March 2009, based on functionality and usability and the provisioning of an integrated solution with consistent data models,” says Kleinjohann. (See article SuccessConnect: The Biggest Cloud in the World) Kleinjohann cites: “We have seven modules in place – target setting, performance management, compensation management, roundtables, career development planning, recruitment management, and employee profiles. We went live within 6 months with the target setting module which we rolled out to 170,000 employees. We now have 400,000 employees information loaded into 4Success and have 40,000 log ins per day.” SuccessFactors had the fastest implementation, best functionality, usability, and integrated capabilities. Kleinjohann says: “I believe that Cloud Computing will be adopted by IT sooner than we expect.”

The audience enthused over the Siemens presentation stating that it was a pretty impressive story for an impressive first day in Frankfurt!




