SuccessFactors and VMware Announce First-of-its-Kind Agreement to Deliver Platform as a Service Offering on Cloud Foundry™ to Extend Business Execution Value in the Cloud

SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, SuccessFactors, Inc. (NYSE: SFSF), the global leader in business execution software, announced an agreement with VMware to empower its customers and partners to extend SuccessFactors applications using the VMware Cloud Foundry™ Platform as a Service (PaaS) beta.

"We're thrilled to launch our Cloud Foundry™ project with SuccessFactors.  Cloud Foundry continues to gain traction as the PaaS of choice for modern and open cloud application development," said Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware.  "This new project takes the Cloud Foundry vision one step further, enabling customers to extend and build custom applications around SuccessFactors to address specific business and vertical use cases, without restricting the choice of development frameworks, data or application services.  Cloud Foundry helps ensure customers can build applications using open and industry-standard development technologies while preserving the flexibility to deploy across both public and private clouds.  SuccessFactors and VMware are both committed to enabling custom development and integration across a broad ecosystem of SaaS providers."

“This agreement is the revolution the cloud industry needs. Our announcement with VMware represents a paradigm shift in the way companies will consume cloud services.  We believe SuccessFactors has the world’s largest cloud deployments, and we plan to empower our 3,500+ customers with 15 million subscription seats and our partners to rapidly develop custom extensions and integrations of our solutions on Cloud Foundry™ in an open and non-proprietary manner.  This open approach will allow CIOs to leverage the skills they already have on their team, and further unlock the value from their investment with SuccessFactors,” said Lars Dalgaard, founder and CEO, SuccessFactors.  “This is a strategic move for our customers because as their use of our various applications is increasing, in many cases customers are using 5-10 SuccessFactors applications, the ability to interface and extend into other business areas is irresistible for them.  Where we don’t want to build them ourselves, through Cloud Foundry we can extend business data from our apps into company specific apps and extensions connecting us deeper into our customers’ business, at a low cost to them and without cost to us. The cloud belongs to all of us and this agreement presents CIOs and business leaders with immense flexibility to extract much more value from their public and private clouds, and we believe, create unseen cross functional business value and multi-directional business execution data in and out of SuccessFactors’ BizX Suite. This significantly increases its value for existing customers and makes it much more attractive and lower risk to new customers.”

SuccessFactors was able to build its first application on CloudFoundry.com within hours that integrated Google Maps data with SuccessFactors' employee location data from its next generation Core HR Information System platform, Employee Central. Today, SuccessFactors' customers and partners have the same ability to easily build, test and run their applications on CloudFoundry.com. In the near term, the new SuccessFactors integration with Cloud Foundry will enable customers and partners to combine its capabilities with other web applications.  

"The unique competitive advantage of this platform is that it is open and enables development on standard development languages such as web service APIs, Java, PHP, Ruby-on-Rails, HTML, Ajax, Javascript and the Spring Framework (Java)," said Aaron Au, co-founder and chief technology officer, SuccessFactors. "Our customers can create a Cloud Foundry account, integrate with SuccessFactors data via our APIs and create, deploy and scale their own applications within hours. We believe this is the future of enterprise cloud computing."

More information is available at http://www.successfactors.com/info/en/vmware-cloud-foundry.

About SuccessFactors, Inc.

SuccessFactors is the leading provider of cloud-based Business Execution Software, and delivers business alignment, team execution, people performance, and learning management solutions to organizations of all sizes across more than 60 industries. With approximately 15 million subscription seats globally, we strive to delight our customers by delivering innovative solutions, content and analytics, process expertise and best practices insights from serving our broad and diverse customer base. Today, we have more than 3,500 customers in more than 168 countries using our application suite in 34 languages.

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"Safe harbor" statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are SuccessFactors' current expectations and beliefs.

These forward-looking statements include statements about future  product developments and capabilities. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements include: our ability to negotiate execute a final definitive arrangement with VMware, our ability to innovate and develop new products, unforeseen technical issues or delays, and the risk that the relationship will not result in increased customers or revenues. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make.

Further information on these and other factors that could affect these forward-looking statements is included in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and in other filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.

VMware and VMware Cloud Foundry are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

SOURCE SuccessFactors, Inc.