Category: Core HR Systems

SAP’s Bold Move with SuccessFactors: Lots of Work to Do

This week SuccessFactors and SAP announced their integration plans. Simply stated, the combined companies plan to move all their strategic talent management investments from SAP HCM and Business ByDesign into SuccessFactors, and build Employee Central (SuccessFactors’ central directory product) into its core cloud-based HRMS offering.

This is a bold and somewhat risky strategy. Let ... Read more»

The Integration of Talent Management Systems Comes to Forefront

The talent management systems market has been under quite a bit of stress lately.

In the last 90 days we have seen SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors, followed by Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo, and then the smaller Kenexa acquisition of Outstart and PeopleFluent acquisition of Strategia.

And while all this is going on, CornerstoneOnDemand... Read more»

Kenexa Acquires Outstart: Getting Serious about the Corporate Learning Market

This week Kenexa, one of the largest and most successful HR and talent acquisition consulting companies, announced the acquisition of Outstart, a pioneering company in the market for e-learning tools, learning management, collaboration, and mobile learning solutions. This represents a major move for Kenexa, putting the company firmly into the market for training tools, ... Read more»

The LMS Market Remains Hot with PeopleFluent Deal (but not as hot as Facebook)

The LMS market remains very hot, and so does Facebook (below). Comments on both.

This week Peoplefluent (a $100M+ talent management software company, built from the combination of Authoria and Peopleclick) announced the acquisition of Strategia, a small but very successful enterprise learning management systems company. Strategia was a Canadian enterprise LMS company with ... Read more»

Getting Bullish on SAP in the HR Marketplace

SAP, the world’s largest application software company, just announced the best revenue and earnings growth the company has made in many years. The company’s quarterly revenues grew by 12% to over $3.4 billion Euros and profits rose by 23% to $1.6 billion. And now that the company has announced its plans to acquire SuccessFactors for ... Read more»

Talent Management Software Vendors get a C+ in Customer Satisfaction

We just completed a year-long research study on the customer experience with talent management software. Despite the sky-high market valuations for these companies and the growth rate of the market, these products are not fully meeting customer needs. In fact, among the 1,146 companies we surveyed, their average overall satisfaction is 3.65 on a scale ... Read more»

Salesforce.com to Acquire Rypple: Major New Entrant to Cloud-Based Talent Management Market

Today Salesforce.com announced plans to acquire Rypple, a small but growing provider of social performance management software. In addition, the company announced plans to build out a set of human capital management products called SuccessForce (quite a stab in the eye to SuccessFactors), built on the “social enterprise” which Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com) has ... Read more»

My Conversation with Paul Sparta: Update on Plateau, SAP, and SuccessFactors

Today I had a chat with Paul Sparta, the founder of Plateau and one of the key product leaders at SuccessFactors and now SAP.  Paul, who’s current title is Chief Integration Officer, shared some important thoughts with me which I felt were worth publishing.

1.  As a result of the acquisition, the SuccessFactors ... Read more»

SAP to buy SuccessFactors: Major Shift in Talent Management Market (updated)

This weekend SAP announced plans to acquire SuccessFactors for approximately $3.4 billion (almost 10X 2011 revenues).

Just last week we delivered a webinar on trends in the Talent Management Systems market, and discussed the fact that this market is rapidly becoming commoditized and that the big vendors were starting to make a major impact.  Listen ... Read more»

Talent Management Software – Yes, It’s Still Hard to Select the Right Solution

The talent management software marketplace is now more than ten years old, yet it is still a daunting task to select the right solution.  This market is both consolidating and expanding at the same time – and let me explain why.

History of the Space

Originally these systems were designed as forms automation systems, often ... Read more»

Update from TaleoWorld 2011: Talent Intelligence, Mobile, and LinkedIn Partnership

This week Taleo held their annual user conference and attracted more than 1,600 customers. As part of the event Taleo introduced two new product enhancements – one called Taleo Radar and the other a major announcement with LinkedIn.  In this blog I will discuss Taleo’s strategy and talent intelligence story, and overview the Radar and ... Read more»

Workday 14: Amazing Enterprise Software for HR

Today Workday introduced release 14, the latest upgrade of the company’s SaaS HR and Financials application.  I rarely gush at enterprise software, but in this case I have to admit I was “wowed” by the progress the company has made.

Workday’s product now spans the range of ERP applications from financials to human resources, workforce ... Read more»

SuccessFactors Q2 2011 Financials – Plateau Moves to SaaS Focus

SuccessFactors just announced another stellar quarter (48% YTY growth in revenues, 42% YTY growth in billings), and the CEO Lars Dalgaard talked extensively about the company’s progress with the acquisitions of Infohrm, Cubetree, Jambok, and Plateau.

First, from a financial standpoint SuccessFactors continues to grow at an amazing rate.  The talent management software market is ... Read more»