Jambok acquisition will add mobile video creation and sharing technology to accelerate the future of corporate social learning and the smarter workplace

SuccessFactors, Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jambok, the SaaS social learning company that draws on the consumer world's popular web 2.0 tools like YouTube and Facebook, to offer even easier next generation on-the-fly mobile video creation, sharing, discovery and social networking that enables informal social learning within the workforce.

Although companies based in the U.S. alone spend more than $100B per year on training, the ability to tap into the informal learning that happens on the job is limited, and the power of user-generated content remains untapped.  With this acquisition, SuccessFactors makes a significant step forward in defining the next generation of results-oriented learning for organizations.

This acquisition will extend SuccessFactors' leadership in Business Execution software with strong new social video creation and sharing tools that will be integrated into the company's current social collaboration offering as well as other areas of the Business Execution (BizX) Suite, including social recruiting. Through its acquisitions over the past year, SuccessFactors has continued to build on its core BizX solution to help its customers' workforce be more productive and to execute effectively against company strategy.

Adding Jambok technology to the BizX suite will offer customers:

• Content Creation & Sharing: Simple and easy tools to share existing multimedia files, documents, videos and/or audio content through a webcam, as well as capture narrated screen casts.  Instantly publish with one-click to the community using a web browser on your computer or mobile device.
• User-centric Social Capabilities: Powerful features including user-generated ratings of content, user-assigned taxonomy applied to content, user-based feedback on content, granular content sorting capabilities and content filtering.
• Community-based Approach: Flexible and secure targeting of content for specific groups of users based on topic, interest or projects.

The Jambok team will join SuccessFactors, including Dr. Karie Willyerd, CEO of Jambok, who will join as vice president of learning and social adoption. Willyerd is an industry veteran and the former chief learning officer for Sun Microsystems, where she led a team that won more than 30 awards from 2008 through 2010, including the ASTD No. 1 training department in the world. She is also the co-author of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today 

The acquisition is expected to close by Tuesday, March 15, 2011.