The integrations will allow Yammer users to see activity stories from both platforms which will appear in Yammer’s scrolling sidebar module.

Activity stories from AffinityLive published in the Ticker enable critical issues — such as a closed deal or an escalated support ticket — to be surfaced faster and allow teams to work more collaboratively across departments. The integration also works with AffinityLive’s automatic email capture, so that teams are alerted when important client emails are sent, improving client service and response time.

Subscribe-HR customers can use Yammer to discuss and collaborate on HR tasks such as company policy changes that appear as activity stories in Yammer’s Ticker. Additionally, employee leave requests are posted into the Yammer feed allowing for greater transparency.

“The continued expansion of our partner ecosystem marks a significant growth opportunity for both Yammer and our customers,” said An Le, vice president of Business Development, Yammer. “We are committed to integrating with leading third-party business applications across the globe such as AffinityLive and Subscribe-HR, making Yammer the social layer across all enterprise applications.”

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2012/03/27/yammer-your-way-to-crm-and-hr-insights.aspx

How would Yammer characterise the level of adoption of its platform in Australia?
Australia has the fifth biggest Yammer user base worldwide. Adoption in Australia has been steadily increasing since Yammer launched in 2008. There are currently over 272,000 users from 15,000 different company networks. Yammer has over 4 million verified corporate accounts worldwide and is growing at 250,000 users per month.

What proportion of that adoption has Yammer been able to commercialise — that is, shift onto one of its premium models?
Right now about 20% of Yammer users are on premium networks.

In which sectors in Australia has Yammer most strongly been adopted so far?
Some of our first customers – globally – were from Australia in traditional private enterprises like Deloitte Australia, NAB and Suncorp. From the outset Yammer has been driven by the belief that every company will have its own social network for collaboration, no matter the size or industry. Today government agencies like VicRoads and not-for-profits like Earth Hour are adopting Yammer as fast as our biggest enterprise customers like NAB and Westfield in the private sector.

Which sectors have been slowest to adopt Yammer?
The beauty of Yammer is that is easily translates across every sector in every geography worldwide, even highly regulated industries such as financial services and pharmaceuticals have high adoption rates.

Can you give examples of Australian organisations which have adopted Yammer?
Yammer adoption spans a range of sectors, industries and organisational sizes; some key customers in Australia include Westfield, National Australia Bank, AMP, Earth Hour and Deloitte.

Deloitte Australia
“I’m very active in talking to our people on Yammer. Every executive wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I have a good strategy. How do I execute it?’ 75% of our employees are young people – digital natives – and this is how they talk to each other. The only way I’m going to get to them is to talk to them in their medium.” -Giam Swiegers, CEO, Deloitte Australia

As Deloitte’s Yammer activity continues to grow and evolve, so do the use cases. In fact, Peter Williams says they now see “a new use case everyday.” Deloitte recognizes that even seemingly “small” ideas can lead to big results, as evidenced by the “fun experiment” with Yammer that started small and resulted in a big transformation. “We are continually amazed by the creativity and ingenuity of our employees, who create new use cases on Yammer every day. Enterprise social networking has helped transform how we operate and collaborate, yet, I feel like we are still just scratching the surface.” – Peter Williams, CEO, Deloitte Digital

“I gave a presentation, shared the link on Yammer, and had a very bold challenge from somebody in Melbourne that disagreed with my view. We got into a public debate, and the next morning quite a few people chatted with me about how remarkable it was that Yammer had flattened the organization. This was a first-year analyst. It’s what we want – I’d much rather have him debate it with me than go to the pub and tell his mates that he doesn’t agree with me. This way I know what’s happening.” -Giam Swiegers, CEO, Deloitte Australia

“Yammer has become an ‘internal Google’ for us. When you have a question, chances are you can search Yammer and find a thread with the answer”. -Luke McCormack, Senior Analyst, Deloitte Australia

Deloitte Australia have built many enterprise integrations into their own services, such as their Innovation Academy app, the Who What Where ‘enterprise foursquare’, and their internal search engines. Running an internal analysis, Deloitte Australia found that professionals with 10 or more posts on Yammer had an average turnover rate of 2%, compared to a firm-wide average of 15-20%. These professionals engaged in internal enterprise social networking were 8-10x as likely to stay with the firm. Lower employee turnover results in significant time and cost savings in recruiting, interviewing, and on-boarding new hires.

When Deloitte launched Yammer globally it was a 90 day rollout to 180k users across many different email and directory systems. This time to value is unheard of and demonstrates how agile and immediate a technical platform can be. With the technical side taken care of that leaves more energy and resources for building adoption and engagement.

Suncorp
Suncorp use Yammer across the company to connect staff and empower them to problem solve with each other. “Your culture is the way that work gets done.” Jeff Smith, Suncorp Business Services. During the floods in Brisbane, 5000 people couldn’t make it to work. Within a couple of hours 3,000 people were working from home, thanks to Yammer.

Earth Hour
Earth Hour have 8 employees in Sydney, and then an External Network connecting 440 volunteers from across the world. Everyone in the organisation sees campaign updates immediately, which has dramatically transformed internal comms. Yammer provides an easy way to share experiences, challenges, opportunities, relationships with other organizations to make the campaign more efficient and to grow. “It has revolutionised how the campaign is working” Andy Ridley Founder and CEO, Earth Hour.

What level of integration are you seeing Australian organisations apply to Yammer with respect to their other business systems (for example, SharePoint, Salesforce.com)?

We see many of our customers integrating with enterprise systems such as SharePoint, SAP, Salesforce, Netsuite, Spigit and Zendesk to create a single place where all users can connect. Yammer is a system of engagement that helps to bring context to employees working in various knowledge silos in an organisation. Our ability as a cloud service to integrate with on-premise software such as SAP is quite unique in the enterprise space. We also just announced two new integrations with Subscribe-HR and AffinityLive, both Australian-based cloud-based business applications.

What level of awareness do Australian organisations have about Enterprise 2.0 technologies in general?
Australians spend more time on social media sites than any other country in the world, and we are now starting to see the trends from the consumer space move into the enterprise, while the younger generations entering the workforce demand mobile, cloud and social tools from their employers.

Organisations are now recognising technology’s formidable impact on communication and the ability to connect to people and content more efficiently than ever before. We often hear executives talk about the rising expectation for software in the workplace to be as intuitive and easy as software in employees’ personal lives. Companies that want to excite and retain their talent and leadership, especially those in the younger generation, are looking to Enterprise 2.0 technologies to do just that.

Have you encountered any criticism from customers concerned about the fact that Yammer isn’t hosted in Australia?
Yammer’s core focus is to maintain a secure private network architecture to protect customer data, and we work very closely with our clients to ensure they understand our security and compliance tools and standards. Having local customers such as NAB, a big four bank, Suncorp in banking and insurance, and Deloitte Australia in audit and professional services demonstrates the confidence customers have in our platform.

What is Yammer’s plan to increase adoption of its platform in Australia?
With the $85 million round of venture capital funding we raised earlier this year we will be more than doubling our Sales and Customer Success staff in Australia. Today we have 8 staff in Australia, 7 in Melbourne and 1 in Sydney, and by the end of the year we expect that to grow to between 20-25 while serving as the hub for Asia Pacific.

http://delimiter.com.au/2012/03/27/questions-answers-yammer-australia/

Professional services organizations use AffinityLive to track key business processes in a single simple, automated solution. Activity stories from AffinityLive published in the Ticker enable critical issues — such as a closed deal or an escalated support ticket — to be surfaced faster and allow teams to work more collaboratively across departments. The integration also works with AffinityLive’s automatic email capture, so that teams are alerted when important client emails are sent, improving client service and response time.

Subscribe-HR’s e-Recruitment and e-HR software manages the entire HR process, enabling businesses to provide innovative people services that supports and builds people capability. With the integration, Subscribe-HR customers can use Yammer to discuss and collaborate on HR tasks such as company policy changes that appear as activity stories in Yammer’s Ticker. Additionally, employee leave requests are posted into the Yammer feed allowing for greater transparency.

Yammer also integrates with Badgeville, Box, Expensify, GageIn, Kindling, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Moreover Technologies, NetSuite, Planview, Salesforce.com, SAP, Sparqlight, Spigit, TripIt and Zendesk.

For more information about Yammer on Tour events, please visit: www.yammer.com/tour/ : ctt.marketwire.com/?release=866648&id=1411411&type=1& ..

Comments on the News
“The continued expansion of our partner ecosystem marks a significant growth opportunity for both Yammer and our customers. We are committed to integrating with leading third-party business applications across the globe such as AffinityLive and Subscribe-HR, making Yammer the social layer across all enterprise applications.”
— An Le, vice president of Business Development, Yammer

“With the AffinityLive Yammer integration, colleagues can discover, comment on and engage in real time to make businesses more responsive and coordinated than ever before. Yammer’s Ticker now automatically becomes the social pulse of the business, with the benefit that the social signals are focused on getting real work done for real clients.”
— Geoff McQueen, founder and CEO, AffinityLive

“Subscribe-HR’s innovative e-Recruitment and e-HR software is changing the way businesses around the globe approach HR. The Subscribe-HR Yammer integration creates enterprise social networks that allow collaboration on HR information and processes across an entire organisation. We’re excited by the synergies of the Subscribe-HR Yammer integration and what it offers both our existing customers and other businesses worldwide.”
–Mathew French, founder, Subscribe-HR

This can present a difficult situation for businesses as the gap between e-Recruitment and HRIS can be hard to bridge. Either, the e-Recruitment Software will need to cater for on-boarding and sophisticated data import or the HRIS software will need to manage this. This can be very costly and cumbersome if the systems are not flexible enough to cater for this requirement.

Subscribe-HR is a two-in-one HR Software, e-Recruitment software system, that allows businesses to manage their entire process from hire to retire. Job sites can be communicated with from Subscribe-HR, allowing businesses to upload into Job Boards like Seek, MyCareer and CareerOne. Applicants can seamlessly click apply in these Jobs Boards and start the on-boarding process, whereby filtering of the Applicant occurs based on attributes and questionnaire responses. The whole way through the recruitment process, Subscribe-HR keeps applicants informed dealing with them in a considered professional manner.

When you have found the most appropriate candidate/s, Subscribe-HR will on-board the Applicant and process them into Employees, managing the on-boarding process and Contract Sign-off process. All applicant details are automatically captured in the Core-HR system, and Self-Service access accounts and launched. Payroll information can then be sent out to Payroll Software like CHRIS21, Micropay, Axapta, Attache and Payglobal.

You may like to consider how much time this would save your HR team. How much more efficient the HR Department can become. This is a powerful conversation to be having as executive level.

Oracle’s latest quarterly results should provide a peak at just how confident companies have become in the economy by their willingness to spend money on new technology.

The report, due out after the stock market closes Tuesday, covers Oracle’s fiscal third quarter – a period spanning December through February. That coincided with the biggest three-month hiring spurt in the US during the past two years. The trend could signal companies aren’t as worried about the threat of another recession, encouraging them to increase spending in other areas.

That would be good news for Oracle, which sells software and computer hardware to large companies and government agencies throughout the world.

It is the biggest maker of database software, which helps other companies organise information. It also sells many of the applications that help companies do everything from processing their payroll to managing relationships with customers and partners.

Oracle stumbled in the quarter the ended in November, largely because several prospective customers decided to delay their purchases. The skittishness raised fears that companies were clamping down on their budgets as government debt problems in Europe threatened to topple a still-fragile economy.

Now that it looks like the US economy is in better shape than it was three months ago, analysts and investors will be looking for any signs of other problems that could undercut Oracle’s earnings growth. The concerns that Oracle could be grappling with issues that extend beyond the economy have grown since other business technology vendors such as, VMware and EMC, posted solid results for their most recent quarters.

Oracle is facing tougher competition from longtime rival SAP, as well as from feisty upstarts such as Salesforce and Workday that are changing the way that companies buy and use software. Salesforce and Workday are among a crop of software makers that offer applications as a subscription service that can be accessed on any device with an internet connection. The online approach to software, nicknamed “cloud computing,” is a departure from the industry’s long-established practice of licensing and installing applications on individual machines kept in the buyer’s offices.

After initially dismissing cloud computing rivals as an inconsequential novelty, Oracle has started to invest heavily in the concept. Oracle completed a $US1.5 billion acquisition of Salesforce rival RightNow Technologies in January and has proposed buying Workday rival Taleo in a $US1.9 billion deal expected to close later this year. SAP also has hopped on the cloud-computing bandwagon with a $US3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors.

JMP Securities analyst Ross MacMillan isn’t convinced Oracle’s cloud-computing acquisitions will be enough to prevent a significant number of its customers from defecting to Salesforce and Workday.

Oracle can only hope its cloud-computing deals work out better than its $US7.3 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. By acquiring Sun’s line of computer servers in 2010, Oracle hoped to create a one-stop shop for business software and hardware. So far, though, the idea hasn’t been widely embraced, partly because some companies don’t want to become too dependent on Oracle for all their technology.

The expansion into computer hardware also has soured Oracle’s relationship with IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which used to promote Oracle’s software more enthusiastically. The situation with HP has gotten even worse since its former CEO, Mark Hurd, went to work for Oracle in 2010 after resigning from HP in an ethics scandal.

Coming off the disappointing results at the end of last year, Oracle management set the bar low for the December-February period.

The company, which is based in Redwood Shores, California, warned its sales of new software licenses might be unchanged from the same time last year. At best, Oracle predicted its software sales would increase by 10 per cent. New software licenses are closely watched by investors because they generate future revenue for maintenance and upgrades.

Oracle forecast its sales of hardware products would fall by 5 per cent to 15 per cent from last year.

Source: SMH http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/oracles-results-to-provide-gauge-on-technology-20120320-1vgut.html

The reason for this is usually based around data and information capture. In the e-Recruitment environment, companies usually have limited amount of older data to get into the system. As well as this, information processing is usually based on flow in and out. Flow in data is sorted based on questionnaires and other qualifying capabilities, to enable users to intelligently analyse information. E-Recruitment systems usually include external people, Core-HR users and some management.

e-Learning software involves a lot of Content Set-up which can take time and be quite costly.

Payroll systems require large amounts of data to be imported and balancing to be done. Award interpretation can also be difficult to manage and usually requires another T&A system for success.

HR Software can require data upload and many workflow processes to be initiated within the business. There workflows can be require for many different, separate tasks that incorporate the whole business.

Salary Packing systems require integration with Payroll and choices around employee selection options. Managing changes and calculations.

Psych Testing system usually require a qualified psychologist to provide meaning to the feedback gather from Applicants following submission.

Really, all businesses can benefit from e-Recruitment Software systems, that allow them to find the best Talent quickly, by opening up new and traditional avenues for Talent Management. The better at gathering and managing Talent based information, the more competitive they become in the future when it comes to getting the best ahead of the competition. This dove tails into branding and communications which goes hand in hand with marketing strategy. After all, all businesses market to their prospects, why not market to those that you want working for you.

Create flexible Recruitment Workflow Processes to enable you to step Applicants through the hiring processes automatically, communicating with them seamlessly at each stage. You should be able to set-up as many different unique processes as required and be able to assign them to positions. Applicant Communication via e-mail or SMS.

Setting up a Vacancy: Once the relevant requisition process has been signed off within the e-Recruitment system, the Vacancy can be activated. Set-up an attribute profile for the Vacancy and Questionnaires, to allow auto scoring of Applicants. This way, by the time your Applicants reach the initial stage of the recruitment processes, you already have an idea of who the best fit for the position is. It’s called Virtual Interviewing. This way you can get the best talent into the interview process as quickly as possible.

Configure the Applicant Screening process you would like the applicant to go through when applying. Would you like them to answer questions first, or submit details like certificates, licences and work experience. Different positions and industries will receive better quality applicants by defining the application process accordingly.

Where would you like to Publish the Vacancy: Jobs Sites, Intranet, Corporate website, Social Media. Do you want to use Talent Pools to invite previous applicants and other Talent Pool based applicants to apply for the Vacancy. Quickly search cover letters and CV’s based on Key Words. Get matches quickly.

Does you Recruitment Team know anyone in Linkedin of Facebook that may be good candidates. Allow them to use the Subscribe-HR Social Media Sharing and Referral Tracking tool. Do you want public users to be able to share Vacancies with their Linkedin Contacts and Facebook Friends? Are you going to offer referral reward incentives.

During the Processing of Applicants, you have the choice to set-up interview panels and allow the panel to score applicants either prior to or after an interview. Integrate with best of breed Psych testing. Receive results of psych test back in the e-Recruitment system automatically. Allow managers to forward CV’s and Cover Letters of talent to other managers. Auto track Applicant sources. Justify Recruitment Spend. Write your own Graphical Reports and insert them into your Dashboard.

Allow your applicants to create their own Self-Service facility to view the status of all their applications. If they want to Schedule an Interview time or even withdraw themselves, let them do this on-line. Saving Recruitment and HR team’s time. Send out Job alerts based on Matches to their requirements. Allow them to share Vacancies with their friends in Linkedin and Facebook.

If you want to make an offer, send their Offer of Employment to them automatically and allow them to digitally accept or reject the offer.

After they have accepted. On-Board them using On-Boarding Checklists. Copy their details automatically into the HR System and Integrate this information seamlessly with Payroll.

Job Done. Can you do this now with you current e-Recruitment system? Is it Cost Effective?

So now, instead of HR Managers having to spend hours and hours on Planning and Execution, with regards to how they deploy their new Employee and Manager, Management System, they can put this in the hands of the experts and delivery system based e-learning, right to the door of their people. Instantly.

We all know that HRIS Software System implementations usually fail due to lack of planning and resource allocation. Now with the Subscribe-HR Turn-Key, on-demand HRIS system and on-demand User Adoption Tool, business are right on track in their efforts to deliver a HR Software and Recruitment Software system, that provides the benefits that it will need to, in order to be seen as a success by the Companies CEO or MD.

Previous to Subscribe-HR’s standard System Delivery and on-demand User Adoption, the likleyhood of the system being delivered to the business on-line and on-budget, were remote. Therefore, the ROI business case has very little chance of success.

Special Thanks to FutureKnowledge: David and Michael Guazzarotto and Matthew Smith.
www.futureknowledge.com.au

Something changed this winter.

Oracle’s software license sales limped up just 2% in December, and the company blamed customer budget cuts and fears over the European debt crisis. Sales to Europe, Africa and the Middle East make up a third of Oracle’s revenues. The stock took an instant 8% hit, but perhaps more tellingly is 22% off its May 2011 high. Investors appear to be signalling that Oracle‘s recent woes are due to more than just stingy customers. Could it be true that big, hulking IT organizations are changing buying patterns?

Patrick Walravens, a veteran software industry analyst at JMP Securities, believes so. He just lowered his ratings on Oracle to “market perform”. He blames the adoption of cloud computing by big accounts.

Walravens’s checks show a willingness of even the largest companies to buy cloud offerings from vendors such as Salesforce.com (this doesn’t surprise) and also privately-held, soon-to-go-public Workday. Walravens recently found one deal of 40,000 seats won by Salesforce from Oracle. He believes it isn’t the largest. Salesforce reports earnings this Thursday. Marc Benioff, no doubt, will mention these deals if he can. Workday, similarly, has won several large deals with 50,000 and above seats.

Both companies are much smaller than Oracle but pose a larger, longer-term threat. Salesforce is aiming to be a technology platform for selling all sorts of business software. Workday has grown sales impressively selling software to manage employees, but is aiming to extend into financials, too.

Meanwhile Walravens makes Oracle’s cloud effort sound like a tangled mess. The company did two large acquisitions of Web software firms: RightNow Technology and Taleo. These will take a while to make any difference. Then more immediately, Oracle has its own “public” clouds. There are nine of them straddling its universe of software offerings. And Oracle has several conferences launching in March to spread the message. But this technology is anything but live. Walravens tried to log in t one and got this message:

“When you submit this form, your information will be placed into a queue for access to controlled availability services. We will be provisioning Java and Database services in batches over the next several months. Our Fusion Application services will be made available shortly after that. You will be notified by email when your instance is ready.”

Ellison’s vision of success via industry consolidation may be at risk. His idea has long been to buy up most of the industry’s players, make them more efficient, upsell their customers on his other applications and the hardware to run it, and milk their maintenance revenues. Even though their technology may be dated, it is sticky. Customers can’t rip it out easily, so they’ll continue to pay the maintenance fees necessary to keep the stuff running. And they’ll buy Oracle’s underlying hardware stack to run it easily. This buys Oracle a brilliantly profitable cash flow to pour into its future.

But Walravens’s modeling suggests otherwise. He’s predicting that Oracle’s software maintenance revenue grows just 6% in the quarter ending this May. A year ago that same revenue line jumped 15% over the year prior. That’s a stunning difference. Walravens also has Oracle barely growing its new software sales while its hardware business shrinks because it lacks that “pull through” of customers from the software side of the business. Overall he figures Oracle’s revenues grow 4.2% in fiscal year 2012.

Sure, it’s just a prediction, but if it is anywhere near true it is a severe challenge to the business model Oracle has been thriving on.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/02/21/is-the-cloud-finally-catching-up-with-mighty-oracle/

Business management software producer SAP is a frontrunner in the cloud-based software market, where companies ‘rent’ software over the internet rather than installing it on their own machines. In December last year SAP extended its reach by purchasing a leader in the employee performance software market, SuccessFactors, for a whopping US$3.4bn. According to a leading analyst in corporate HR, talent management and leadership, John Bersin, the huge SAP and Oracle deals cement three major trends happening in the HR technology space.

1. Corporate software is well and truly moving to the cloud. Bersin said the HR, payroll and talent management software market, worth $15bn, is being revamped, and more and more companies are now starting to replace their core infrastructure software with new cloud products.

2. The market for integrated talent management software has matured. No longer is it necessary for companies to purchase a wide variety of tools to help with recruiting, performance management, training management, compensation management, and workforce planning – all these products are now integrated into complete talent management suites, and small to mid-sized companies can gain the benefits of this software as well.

3. The sheer availability and variety of providers offering cloud-based software means HR customers are now placed to replace old systems with competitively priced cloud software.“If you’re a buyer of HR software, the time couldn’t be better to replace your old systems. And if you’re an investor, get into this space now. It’s still early,” Bersin said.
Research by Deloitte recently found that 84% of Australian companies have either already begun transforming, or plan to transform their HR functions towards cloud computing, and the reason couldn’t be more straightforward: cost-cutting.
Organisations that already have, or will be, implementing cloud technologies cited their chief motivators as:

* No licensing fees

* No additional infrastructure required

* Maintenance is automatically carried out by the provider

* Minimal training, most use a web 2.0 style interface

* HR can connect to all the facilities online, anywhere in the world

* Free trial periods. Unlike traditional software licensing models where there are ongoing fees and annual maintenance costs, using a cloud means a company can move on without any strings attached.

-Stephanie Zillman

Source: Human Capital Magazine : http://www.hcamag.com/news/breaking-news/hr-software-market-the-sleeping-giant-has-awoken/122216/