Less than two weeks ago SAP bought human resources/human capital management software-as-a-service company SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. Salesforce.com followed suit today with the purchase of Rypple, an employee performance management SaaS, for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close April 30, 2012 . Rypple will then be relaunched as “Successforce” as part of a new HCM division at Salesforce.com led by John Wookey, an enterprise software veteran with 20 years of experience at companies including Oracle and SAP.

Rypple, in use by companies such as Facebook, Rackspace and Spotify, isn’t a replacement for a full HCM solution like SuccessFactors or Workday, but it is an interesting service in its own right. However, the launch of the HCM division at Salesforce.com signals the companies desire to compete in this market. In Salesforce.com’s announcement today, Wookey is quoted saying: “With the launch of Successforce, salesforce.com plans to revolutionize HCM starting with an exciting social performance management app that will delight millions of employees around the world.”

Earlier this week Rypple announced its new “Social Goals 2.0” feature which allows employees to set goals, share those goals with others and create tasks relating to those goals. It’s based on the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method developed at Intel. Social Goals integrates with developer favorite project management tool Pivotal Tracker and more integrations are planned.

Rypple’s other features include an employee performance review feature called “Couching,” and its original “Thanks” feature which enables employees to publicly thank one another and give feedback. Rypple makes use of badges as a way to recognize employee accomplishments. Explaining the significance of creating these badges, Rypple co-CEO Daniel Debow told me last year: “If I show you a little ribbon with a little heart shaped thing on the end of it, you probably wouldn’t be impressed with it if you didn’t know what it was. But if I told you that it was a Purple Ribbon and that it’s awarded to people who have been wounded in combat, then would you think it was important?”

Salesforce.com will integrate some of these Rypple features into its other applications. According to the announcement:

With this acquisition, salesforce.com will embed some of Rypple’s next-generation features into its existing products. For example, people will be able to thank colleagues, win badges and provide recognition – all from within Salesforce Chatter. And customers of core Salesforce products – the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Force.com platform – will be able to connect with new employee feedback tools to help drive business goals and power the future of their employee social networks.

Salesforce.com already has an element of gamification in its internal instance of Chatter that CEO Marc Benioff has referred to as Chatterlytics. At the Net:Work conference last year Benioff said that Salesforce.com employee are given bonuses based on their participation in the internal Chatter instance. Salesforce.com Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami has been talking up gamification of the enterprise at conferences in recent months.

Overall, this sounds like a good fit for Salesforce.com and a good first step towards building its own HCM division to take on more established players. Interestingly, Salesforce.com has typically deferred to partners such as FinancialForce.com, Infor and Workday for to fill ERP gaps such as financials and HR. Is an ERP/financial acquisition next?

Regardless, HRM is one of the hot markets to wach next year. Taleo is a potential buyout as is Ultimate Software.