Anxious to maintain visibility in the wake of SAP’s skeleton plans for SuccessFactors (see here), Oracle has its released its preliminary plans for Taleo. The speed with which both are announcing their plans for their SaaS HCM acquisitions (which may well be different to their speed of movement), is a sign of how desperate they are not to lose out to each other, and to the likes of SaaS-only providers Workday and Salesforce.com. This is particularly important now that HCM has become the lead area for SaaS.
Oracle plans more of a command-and-control type of operation with its SaaS HCM acquisition compared to SAP. It will integrate Taleo into the Oracle Public Cloud on which Fusion HCM also runs which should allow integration between the two application suites and provide Taleo with access to identity management, data services and analytics. Taleo’s recruitment and employee on-boarding modules will become the preferred offerings and Taleo, and Oracle’s performance management software be unified into a single product. Taleo Business Edition, which is aimed at smaller companies, will still be available.
At this stage it looks like Oracle has a more coherent integration strategy than SAP but timelines and ability to execute are what it really comes down to so judgment should be reserved (for both vendors) until we see some concrete developments. Oracle certainly is embracing SaaS and with Fusion HCM, RightNow and Taleo set to run on the Oracle Public Cloud it is building a solid SaaS portfolio. So far Oracle and SAP are essentially replicating the SaaS CRM and HCM market. If they can go beyond this and extend the enterprise SaaS use case beyond CRM and HCM, then they will be breaking into new areas that they and their ecosystems can build additional business on.