Insights on Corporate Talent, Learning, and HR Technology
Today SuccessFactors announced plans to acquire InfoHRM (renamed Inform Business Impact) – a small but very well established leader in the area of HR and Talent Analytics and Workforce Planning. We believe this acquisition is very significant for the talent and HR systems marketplace: it now establishes SuccessFactors as the emerging leader in the ... Read more»
Last week Bedford Funding announced its acquisition of Peopleclick and the immediate combination of Peopleclick with existing portfolio company Authoria, 
creating a combined talent management systems company with more than 2,000 customers and $100 Million in revenue. The combined company (now named Peopleclick Authoria) is now a significant player in the talent management systems ... Read more»
As we recap 2009 and look ahead to 2010 in the market for talent management software, two gorillas have emerged: Taleo and SuccessFactors. While together these companies make up less than 20% of the total market, their size and growth has made them companies to watch as this market continues to grow and mature.
In ... Read more»
After almost a year of effort we just released our first-ever Talent Management Systems Customer Satisfaction research. We will be publishing this annually, with next year’s results to coincide with the HR Technology Conference in Fall of 2010.
If you are a talent management systems owner, buyer, or vendor I recommend you read this – ... Read more»
For the last two Octobers we have travelled to the HR Technology Conference to see four HR software providers show off their software in the Talent Management Shootout. While the Shootout is a relatively short event at 75 minutes (each vendor gets about a total of 10-15 minutes of demonstration time), there are often as ... Read more»
Once each year we travel to Chicago to gather with Bill Kutik and dozens of HR vendors to see the latest and greatest technologies applied to human resources.
This year’s conference was as exciting as ever, with many product announcements and exciting innovations to see. Madeline Laurano, our principal analyst in talent acquisition, is ... Read more»
Today
Taleo announced Taleo 10, the company’s new product family name for Taleo Enterprise Recruiting, Taleo Performance, Taleo Compensation, and Taleo Development. Yes, today Taleo formally announced that the company is in the end-to-end “Unified Talent Management” platform market. Did the company just roll a “strike?”
Let me give our readers a few key highlights, ... Read more»
This week SuccessFactors 
took a somewhat bold move by relaunching itself as a “Business Execution” software company. This idea, which is not new (The Balanced Scorecard Initiative® has been working on tools for this for many years), is to reposition the company’s performance and talent management software as a way to build strong alignment ... Read more»
The term SaaS (Software as a Service) has become a hot topic among HR and L&D software providers. In fact, many of the HR software buyers use stories about their “SaaS-iness” as their major selling points.
To try to help demistify this topic, I’d like to take some time to explain what SaaS means to ... Read more»
As the
talent management software industry continues to grow and mature, it is time to ask some critical questions.
How well do these systems really work? How well do they drive value? Do they meet customer expectations? And what can vendors, customers, and consultants do to create higher levels of satisfaction and ROI?
We will ... Read more»
Even in this year’s terrible economy, the Talent Management Software market continues to show signs of life. We estimate this important market will reach around $2.4 Billion by the end of 2009 and continues to grow in size and importance.
How the Talent Management Software Market is Expanding
This week we met with the head of L&D from a large financial services institution. This company, like many others, has just completed a wrenching reorganization and redesign of its global learning organization to save money. In this particular case the company is also integrating the L&D teams from several acquired companies.
(I know this ... Read more»
The LMS market continues to heat up as two private equity firms bid for SumTotal Systems. 
This week Vista Equity Partners upped its bid to $4.75 a share (up from $3.80 several weeks ago), bringing SumTotal’s market capitalization to over $150 Million. (This is nearly twice the market cap of Saba, who’s revenues are ... Read more»
A 
very important partnership was announced today: IBM announced a major commitment to Saba as its primary learning management technology partner.
Background on IBM’s Learning Platform Business:
IBM has been in the corporate learning market for many years. In the 1980’s, the company offered a wide range of corporate training tools and systems, including PC ... Read more»
We have been carefully looking at the Talent Management Software market over the last few weeks, and the first quarter of 2009 was a bit of a disaster. The market for performance and succession management software, which we believe finished 2008 around $520M in size and is expected to grow to $655M in 2009, had ... Read more»