SuccessFactors snaps up YouCalc, debuting ‘massive calculator in the sky’

Danish business analytics shop YouCalc has been acquired by cloud-based software firm SuccessFactors, as the latter continues its buying spree and pushes further into providing a suite of cloud applications to businesses hungry for the newest technology.

The choice of YouCalc as its latest buy seems to pencil out. SuccessFactors today unveiled YouCalc’s new Calculator in the Cloud platform, which lets businesses collect and rehash data from a host of sources all in one central console.

The company has dubbed the new product a “massive calculator in the sky.” A business using the software could simultaneously check out sales figures, give immediate info for how much cash is on hand, sift through stats from its website and rake through data from third party cloud-based applications.

The Calculator in the Cloud platform will be combined with SuccessFactors’ BizX Suite to give existing customers such as McGraw-Hill real-time predictions about what consumers want and whether or not the company is meeting those needs.

SuccessFactors’ recent spending splurge has targeted other similar companies. It snapped up Inform Business Impact, a privately-held company that focuses on performance measurement and workforce planning software, for $40 million in February, and social software firm CubeTree for $50 million in May.

YouCalc was formerly the portfolio company of Copenhagen-based Sunstone Capital, which specializes in early funding for startups in technologies, products and services for the global market.

“YouCalc is a truly dynamic, real-time, and cloud analytics platform,” Jimmy Fussing Nielsen, managing partner of technology ventures at Sunstone, told VentureBeat. “I wonder what SuccessFactors’ competitors will do because nobody else offers anything that resembles YouCalc. That, they will learn soon enough.”

The team that created the Calculator in the Cloud technology will now move to SuccessFactors, including YouCalc co-founder and CEO Rasmus Madsen, who has joined as senior director of product marketing, and YouCalc co-founder and CTO Henrik Kjaer, who will now become senior director of engineering.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SuccessFactors said it originally closed the acquisition in July, but was announcing it today to coincide with Calculator in the Cloud’s rollout.

SuccessFactors’ products are currently used in 168 countries and 34 languages by more than 8 million users and 3,000 companies daily. That is significant growth from its founding in 2003, when it had around 300,000 users at 100 companies.

The firm went public in November 2007.