According to a recent agreement signed between SuccessFactors, Inc. and VMware, SuccessFactors will use VMware Cloud Foundry(TM) Platform to build its applications. The new integration will enable customers and partners to combine its capabilities with other web applications.

Using CloudFoundry, SuccessFactors built its first application within hours. The application integrated Google (News - Alert) Maps data with SuccessFactors' employee location data from its next generation Core HR Information System platform, Employee Central.  SuccessFactors’ customers and partners can now easily build, test and run their applications on CloudFoundry.com.

"We're thrilled to launch our Cloud Foundry(TM) 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 (News - Alert) 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(TM) 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."

Rahul Arora is a TMCnet contributor. He has worked as an editor and freelance writer for several reputed organizations in India. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves