Insights on Corporate Talent, Learning, and HR Technology
In the last 60 days I’ve had the opportunity to attend five major industry events which cover corporate learning: user group meetings at Plateau, Saba, SumTotal and Taleo and the HR Technology Conference. While all this travel has taken a toll on my sleep, it did reinforce the tremendous importance of corporate learning technology.
In ... 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»
The corporate training industry is undergoing some major changes. Over last few months we have been involved in many discussions with organizations about the tremendous needs to build, manage, and formalize their social and collaborative learning programs. This is being driven by many factors: the slowing economy, the “always-connected” nature of the workforce, and the ... 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»
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
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»
It’s now official. After surveying our entire research membership and having more than 30 conversations with leading HR and learning leaders (including with Xerox, Accenture, British Telecom, Edward Jones, Department of Defense, and Network Appliance), I am now 100% convinced that “informal learning” has become “formal.” That is, if you want to build a high-impact, ... 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»
I just completed a series of interviews with three organizations going through the important, challenging, and time consuming process of implementing a new performance management system. In each case (a large healthcare provider, a global mining company, and a global call center operations company), the company is using the implementation of a performance management system ... Read more»
This month we are launching The High Impact Learning Organization®, a research study which has been more than three years in development. During this time we have interviewed hundreds of corporate HR and training leaders and reviewed in-depth trends of more than 780 global organizations.
Audio Overview of this research: click here.
As ... Read more»
We just released the largest-ever research study on the market for talent management suites. This research took place over the last 18 months and is the result of an exhaustive analysis of 20 vendors, 800+ HR managers, and in-depth meetings with more than 50 organizations. Leighanne Levensaler, our principal analyst in this area, is ... Read more»
As we continue to study best-practices in talent management and talk with many organizations, we see more and more evidence that top-down goal alignment and transparency truly do drive business results.
For example, we recently had an in-depth discussion with the Vice-President of HR at Bon-Ton Stores, a highly-successful mid-sized retailer which operates among the ... Read more»
The Quandry of Selecting Learning Management Systems
After many years as an analyst in this market, learning management systems continue to amaze me. They are like chameleons – continuously changing and morphing to survive as corporate learning and software markets evolve. We have seen four big phases over the last 10 years: first as back-office ... Read more»
In the last 12 months we have seen many mergers in the learning market take place: Oracle’s acquisition of Peoplesoft, SumTotal’s acquisition of Pathlore, Saba’s acquisition of Thinq, and KnowledgePlanet’s acquisition of KnowledgeImpact.
Why these Mergers are Occurring
In general the enterprise learning and LMS markets are maturing. The LMS market has grown big enough ... Read more»
