Insights on Corporate Talent, Learning, and HR Technology
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»
Today was a very important day in the world of corporate learning and talent management systems.
Vista Equity Partners, a mid-sized private equity firm, announced a proposal to acquire SumTotal Systems, the largest independent provider of LMS software, and one of the pioneers in this industry.
Typically such transitions occur because the shareholders have ... Read more»
ARAMARK is one of the country’s most well-run, talent-driven companies – and they are proof that talent management, when done well, is one of the most important business strategies a company can embrace.
Who is ARAMARK?
ARAMARK is an amazing 250,000 person global company which provides facilities management and food service for many of the ... Read more»
Today Softscape settled the lawsuit filed by SuccessFactors in March of 2008. This lawsuit, which we wrote about in a prior blog post, revolved around a contentious sales presentation which was developed by Softscape and leaked into the public domain. In the final settlement Softscape agreed that the presentation in question had some errors ... Read more»
As the US economy lost 240,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rises to 6.5%, one of the questions I know many people ask is the direction of the “talent management” marketplace. Let me give you our thoughts on the trends taking place.
First, the urgency of “talent management” in corporate HR organizations has ... Read more»
In the last year many of our research members and clients have come to us for help in restructuring their HR or Learning & Development organizations. There have been three major forces at play here.
1. Reducing costs: In nearly every industry organizations are going through restructuring, mergers, or other cost-cutting efforts. The HR department ... Read more»