Insights on Corporate Talent, Learning, and HR Technology
As I describe in the article “The HR Software Market Reinvents Itself,” we have entered a new world in the $14 billion market for HR software and tools. While many large organizations have made the shift from licensed software to cloud-based HR systems (fueling growth by Oracle, SAP, Workday, ADP, Infor, Cornerstone and ... Read more»
For more than 35 years Oracle has been a player in the software market. Founded in 1977 as a database and technology company, Oracle is now one of the largest players in all areas of business software.
I recently spent a day with Oracle’s HR software product team and this article details Oracle’s history and ... Read more»
Despite the recent acquisitions of Taleo by Oracle and SuccessFactors by SAP, the talent management software market is far from mature. Today SilkRoad, one of the more quiet (not for long) talent management software vendors, announced a $35 Million Series C round of funding.
The new investors include Keating Capital (Nasdaq: KIPO) and NTT ... Read more»
BigData is Big News.
Splunk, a company that uses BigData technology to analyze huge amounts of customer and transaction data, just went public with a valuation at 28X revenue ($3.2 billion). This valuation trumps the hot companies in social networking: Jive trades at 20X revenue, Google trades at 5X revenue, and Facebook, ... Read more»
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»
Last week LinkedIn reported amazing financials (stock jumped almost 20% in one day). The company reported 105% YTY growth in quarterly revenues to $167.7 Million, putting the company on a 2012 plan of $860 Million.
But the real story is the huge jump in revenues from LinkedIn’s recruiting services (“Hiring Solutions”). Revenues in this segment ... Read more»
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»
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»
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»
Over the last ten years or so the talent management software providers have had a party building up a $3 billion, fast-growing marketplace. Now, starting in 2011 and 2012, the elephants from the markets of core HR have arrived – and they plan to come in and start making the party a lot messier.
Last ... Read more»
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»
Today Taleo announced the acquisition of JobPartners, 
a small European provider of talent management software, for $38M in cash. JobPartners is a small (~100 employees, around $15M-17M in revenues) but well established talent management software provider which has built an end-to-end talent management system primarily focused on the large enterprise market. The company has 68 ... Read more»
Today Stepstone Solutions, one of the largest providers of talent management software solutions, changed their company name to Lumesse. While everyone has their own opinions of naming and branding strategies, I personally believe that this is a very valuable move.
Stepstone, a company with more than 1,700 licensed customers, is a large global software ... Read more»
Remember the dot.com bubble of 1995-2000? I do, and it’s back again. But this time it has a new face, it talks about SaaS, highly connected social applications, mobile apps, and talent management software. 
Talent management software? Yes, SaaS-enabled talent management apps have become one of the hottest investment areas in enterprise software.
The proof ... Read more»
The ever-changing market for Learning Management Systems (LMS) continues to evolve. Last year, Taleo, the largest provider of recruiting software, spent $100 million acquiring mid-market LMS vendor Learn.com. The company’s strategy, which we supported in earlier blog posts, is to expand across all elements of the talent management domain and develop an offering which ... Read more»
