Shawn Price, president of SuccessFactors, kicked off SuccessConnect Sydney with the global trends shaping the HR industry and the business strategy SuccessFactors is applying in response to the changing market.

Australia – the growth engine of APJ

SuccessFactors has been investing in Australia in an unbelievable way, said Price, with the company viewing our southern continent as the “growth engine” for Asia-Pacific Japan.

“If you look at your adoption rate of technology, you’re one of the greatest economies in the world at adopting and embracing change,” said Price.

SuccessFactors has invested over $3 million in the opening of its data centre in Sydney and simultaneously launched the entire suite of SuccessFactors products; bets on the local market Price admits he’s very excited about.

“I am actually trying to triple the company size here in Australia because of our performance in this market,” Price explained.

The company has over a million Australian subscribers, including the Federal Government, New South Wales Government, Woolworths and many more.

The global trends that are changing HR

Through his travels across the globe, Price has observed many companies struggling with the accelerating rate of change.

“If you don’t manage change, the consequences are severe.” Price said now is the time for organisations to be posing the question, “how do I evolve for the level of agility that’s required in this market?”

Demographics and the changing workforce are other trends companies have to contend with worldwide. In many countries around the world, at least 10,000 people will turn 65 every day for the next 18 years.

“You can’t find enough employees to replace that loss. That loss is not only around talent, it’s around experience,” said Price. “Think about the implications of this. You’ve got global companies with a tribe of knowledge leaving the organization every single day. Where are you capturing that, and how you are filling that skills gap?”

This experience gap is going to result in a change of strategy in how companies recruit individuals and how they enable them, how they measure them and how they interconnect.

This new workforce uses social applications like Glassdoor, which gives them a look inside any company. The resume is going to transform into a composite resume that provides a 360-degree view of the applicant using social media.

SuccessFactors vision and strategy

It’s not just about siloed applications at SuccessFactors anymore, but rather horizontal, end-to-end solutions across the recruit-to-retire process.

“What the market is demanding from us is user interfaces that work with a seamless commonality between them. Every customer that we talk to is trying to build, maybe not today, but over 12, 24 and 36-month periods, an HR transformation blueprint. They want to line it up against recruit-to-retire because these processes are highly interconnected,” Price said.

To fulfil this vision, SuccessFactors’ data strategy has enabled a Meta Data Management framework that allows a data object to be created and carried right through the recruiting process, onboarding, and into Employee Central.

Employee Central Core HR in the cloud is SuccessFactors newest product, with over three million subscribers. Its largest customer is Pepsi, with close to 300,000 employees, which is going live in 34 countries around the world with full end-to-end stack and core HR in the cloud.

Price acknowledges that despite developments, the single biggest issue is still support.

“When you put all this together against this vision and what we’re delivering, in full transparency, we’re not quite there. My applications don’t work completely seamlessly together and there are gaps, but we’re getting there,” he said.

Price added that SuccessFactors has switched its entire delivery model from 70 per cent direct to 70 per cent through the partner channel.

“We have systems integration partnerships who’ve committed 2000 certified consultants. Our engagement model is to embed my very best and brightest in what we do really well with what our partners do really well.”

This article was originally published in Inside SAP Winter 2013.