Salesforce.com acquires Rypple for push into cloud HR software

Salesforce.com announced Thursday it will acquire cloud-based performance management vendor Rypple in a bid to enter the human resources software market.

The deal is expected to close before April 30 of next year. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The move comes shortly after SAP made a major market splash by announcing its intentions to buy cloud HR software vendor SuccessFactors, the second-largest pure SaaS (software as a service) company after Salesforce.com.

Exhibiting no small amount of chutzpah, Salesforce.com said it will relaunch Rypple's application as Successforce, a new business unit led by John Wookey, who recently left SAP after serving as a top executive in its SaaS strategy. Salesforce.com had been quiet about Wookey's planned role until now.

"Salesforce.com and Rypple share a vision for extending the social enterprise to transform the way we work," Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement. "The next generation of HCM is not just about a cloud delivery model, it's about a fundamentally better way to recruit, manage and empower employees in a social world."

Rypple will provide the basis for Salesforce.com to "revolutionize" the HCM market, Wookey said in another statement.

Salesforce.com's announcement talked up the social networking pedigree of Rypple's software, which is used by the most famous social network of all, Facebook, as an employee performance management system.

(More to follow).

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

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