Salesforce Extends Cloud Reach Into HR Departments

Continuing to expand the number of application segments it plays in, Salesforce (CRM) today unfurled a set of human resources (HR) applications, dubbed Salesforce for HR, that run on top of its cloud platform.

Coming on the heels of expansions into marketing, customer service and business intelligence, the move into the HR segment pits Salesforce against rivals such as Workday (WDAY) that pioneered much of the adoption of HR applications running in the cloud.

Rather than coming to market with applications focused only on sales organizations, Salesforce is making it clear that its moniker now only represents where it got its initial start. Salesforce now offers a much broader range of enterprise applications that not only pits it against Workday in the HR space, but increasingly SAP and Oracle (ORCL) rivals that are trying to convert many of their existing customers into versions of their own enterprise applications, including software-as-a-service offerings for HR departments, delivered via the cloud.

Attributes of Salesforce for HR include the ability to create online communities around specific employees, an HR Help Desk module; a Salesforce HR Analytics module for tracking employee performance and a set of mobile computing applications designed to make it possible for HR departments to engage employees more directly.

A big part of the overall Salesforce strategy is the deliverance of a suite of applications that all share a common set of underlying records, logins and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) to improve workflow across the entire organization.

While competition in the HR applications space in the cloud is already fierce, Jim Sinai, senior director for AppExchange and platform marketing at Salesforce said there are still massive numbers of organizations relying on legacy HR software running on premise that from a user experience perspective has simply become outdated. In fact, Sinai notes that when most people use applications at work it’s as if they are stepping back in time because the cloud applications they use in their daily lives are much more elegant and sophisticated.

For solution providers selling cloud applications Sinai is making a compelling point. For all the talk about saving money and agility enabled by the shift to the cloud, the simple fact of the matter is that the applications most organization use today are simply tired. Almost every process not only involves more steps than it should, the ability to actually collaborate with colleagues within most of those application environments is simply non-existent. The shift to the cloud these days isn’t so much about time and money; but rather the superior application experience that cloud applications enable.