SuccessFactors Jam Played an Important Role During The Merger

During SAP TechEd last week, I was invited to an analysts and influencers meeting with SAP's Co-CEO Bill McDermott. Vijay Vijayasankar, Associate partner from IBM and SAP Mentor asked Bill about the use of SuccessFactors applications inside SAP. I was not surprised when Bill singled out SuccessFactors Jam as the product that created the most impact inside SAP.

I had a ring side view of this unfolding in the weeks and months after SuccessFactors became an SAP Company. Email systems were not unified. We did not have access to each others networks. But every team inside the company, every individual for that matter, had the right to create a Jam group and invite anyone from either company to collaborate  share, create and decide. We took full advantage of that and executed with remarkable agility.

Two factors were key to the success of Jam usage inside SAP. The first one was that the product was in the cloud and was used without IT support. Second reason is the video creation and sharing tool in Jam.

I will recommend SuccessFactors Jam for this particular use case for all SAP Customers. I think every organization in the world will face M&A scenarios more often that before.

Here are some M&A statistics. Mergers and acquisitions increased 12 fold between 1985 and 2012. The total value of mergers and acquisitions in 2011 is $ 5 trillion.

A total of 43,000 M&A deals were announced in 2011. Although mergers and acquisitions slowed a bit in 2012, they remain a preferred way for organizations to attain growth.