This blog is intended to give you a quick overview of how SAP and SuccessFactors are working together to give our customers the full power of the cloud, without compromise. To get the full story, download this white paper: “SAP HANA Cloud Platform, extension package for SuccessFactors demystified.” It has much more information as well as use case stories that highlight the benefits of this solution.
If your IT department is like almost every other one around the world, you are most likely having a discussion with your CIO about moving to a cloud-computing environment. You may be asking yourselves questions such as, “What should we move to the cloud? How much control will we lose? And what will be the biggest risks? Where will we need to compromise?”
One of the biggest challenges we find customers having is with their on-premise applications that support mission-critical business processes. These types of applications often cause a stumbling block in the move to the cloud because they usually have a high degree of customization that can’t easily be duplicated in a cloud-based solution.
This is particularly evident with human capital management (HCM) system. HCM solutions demand the power of the cloud to be truly competitive, but Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications that many cloud vendors offer are often a “one-size-fits-all model” that doesn’t work well with their existing business processes.
This is where the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, extension package for SuccessFactors comes in. We’ve built this Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution to give SAP and SuccessFactors customers the perfect balance between the innovation of the cloud and the control of the on-premise solutions.
PaaS: Delivering power from day one
As a customer, you now can preserve your unique, differentiated business processes and experience the benefits of the cloud – all without the need to compromise.
The extension package for SuccessFactors allows you to easily adapt and integrate SuccessFactors cloud applications to your existing business processes. Because this is a PaaS environment, it supports globalization, mobility, collaboration, integration, and analytics out of the box. These capabilities are embedded in the infrastructure so you don’t have to add them later on as you would with other cloud solutions.
With the extension package for SuccessFactors, you’ll immediately be able to take advantage of:
- Big Data analytics for real-time data input, analysis, and decision making
- Shared benefits of applications that are available through a marketplace
- Shared services such as identity management, security, mobility, collaboration, and portal functionality that are essential for building application extensions
- Open standards that support any language that compiles to Java, HTML5, and the Open Data protocol (OData) for easier extension development
- An extended ecosystem of developers and partners that can contribute not only technical capabilities, but also domain expertise for HCM solutions
A beautiful marriage: SAP HANA and SuccessFactors MDF
The extension package for SuccessFactors delivers the in-memory computing speed of the SAP HANA platform and includes capabilities from the SuccessFactors Metadata Framework (MDF). Together with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, this technology package is designed specifically with ready-to-use functionality for advancing the scope and reach of SuccessFactors applications.
This means you can easily extend the core functionality of your SuccessFactors HCM suite and integrate it with other SuccessFactors applications at the data, security, and user-interface levels to provide a consistent, beautiful user experience.
It doesn’t matter whether you want to extend your cloud or on-premises applications, build entirely new cloud applications, or enable new processes to meet any unique business need you might have. The extension package for SuccessFactors makes it easy with these built-in features:
- Functionality for building a harmonized end-user experience across the standard SuccessFactors modules and new platform extensions
- Administrative capabilities to manage the full lifecycle of the extensions from discovery and trial to authoring and publishing from within SuccessFactors solutions
- Development services for building extensions that are tightly connected and integrated to SuccessFactors applications
- A framework that allows users, such as business analysts, to build application extensions from inside SuccessFactors user interface
- Partners solutions and extension applications that are available contextually inside SuccessFactors to try and buy
- Technology for creating HTML5 rich user interfaces for mobile and social media apps
There’s more to this story…
As mentioned in the introduction, this blog provides a quick highlight of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, extension package for SuccessFactors.
The SAP HANA Cloud Platform, extension package for SuccessFactors is providing the missing link that many companies have been searching for as they try to find the right balance between the cloud and the on-premise world. We hope you can see how it delivers the benefits of cloud technologies – such as rapid innovation and application deployment, scalability, and reduced operating expenses – while preserving the control and flexibility of your on-premise applications.
To read more about this powerful solution, download the full white paper, “SAP HANA Cloud Platform, extension package for SuccessFactors demystified,” today, see SuccessFactors extension package video and visit Introducing SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
