Jam is a collaboration tool with the inevitable Facebook-like characteristics including profiles, groups, activity streams, and likes, but with additional rich media capabilities. It is being offered as a free add-on to SuccessFactors subscribers, but a paid-for premium edition is available too.
The move mirrors Salesforce.com’s Chatter strategy (see Salesforce.com dreams of the social enterprise). It is a defensive move in that it is a direct attempt to keep SAP and SuccessFactors users from straying but also has an offensive element as part of the wider goal of capturing the social front office. There is a lot a stake. Having effectively lost on the high volume SaaS CRM front to Salesforce.com and other SaaS CRM providers, SAP is anxious not to avoid a repeat in the HCM space, which is a lot closer to its core.
Salesforce.com is now active in the HCM space with Rypple (its acquired HCM platform). It is also actively targeting SAP’s customer base following the October announcement of services designed to turn SAP deployments into social enterprises. SAP does not just have to fend off competing providers of business-oriented SaaS applications (and lets not forget the emerging Oracle/Taleo combo and Oracle’s broader SaaS ambitions – Oracle runs out its SaaS HCM prelim plans), it also has to contend with other social platform providers such as Yammer and Socialcast and Jive. The pace is picking up in what was already a fast moving market – we’ll be sure to keep you up to speed.