Hello from Denver!
The average HR practitioner must be so confused with what services vendors really offer in the space. With several companies changing names and others merging, it is more than a full-time job just keeping up with who is who and what products anyone offers anymore. In fact, I probably receive 150 press releases a week. In many ways this puts me in a position of being a press release critic. I love the releases that have:
- Pure research and survey details included
- Merger and Acquisition news
- Major client wins with demonstrable ROI, and
- Winners of important awards (demonstration of best practices).
I am less enamored with releases that have:
- new people joining the organization (unless it is the CEO)
- a webcast or some staff member speaking at an event
- change in locations, or
- earnings reports (I can get these anywhere).
I am very interested in the releases that indicate settlement of a lawsuit, since in most cases a release is never issued indicating that a lawsuit has been launched.
For HR Executives, this confusion has bred an entirely different set of vendors. These are niche consulting firms that can help you with the vendor selection as well as implementation: companies such as Newman Group or HR Architect (for Talent Acquisition), Iconixx (for Compensation) and Dan Cox of Cox Consulting (for LMS). Of course our friends at Knowledge Infusion are also into this. Many of these firms also help with the implementation of the products they help you choose.
Being an online media outlet, we are very concerned with the recent settlement of approximately $90 million from Google to advertisers for fraudulent click thrus. Apparently a very effective competitive strategy was to pay someone to click on all your competitions´ banners and Google adsense words. This depleted their inventory quickly to non-meaningful leads and drove up their price per click so they spent more money on advertising that did not work. What is so concerning is the size of the settlement. Ninety million dollars on ads only delivered since 2002! Think back to a mere five to seven years ago - that was probably all of Google´s revenue. Recent articles in Business Week´s March 27th issue had some really good advice on the future of advertising technology. It clearly indicated that online advertising was significantly increasing with a focus on banners, as opposed to search. It also indicated that a banner ad on Yahoo or MSN can run $500,000 per day. Holy crap! That makes the Super Bowl ad look cheap and once again emphasizes the value of good PR, which can be free if managed properly. Imagine getting to that front page with a newsworthy story. People used to strive for major media publication in print publications such as The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. So how do you court Yahoo, AOL and MSN with your newsworthy content? Good question. If anyone has any ideas please share!
Of course to make all this online advertising even worse is that many of the major advertising agencies truly do not understand online advertising. Their junior ad buyers are more interested in higher commission work (like ads in Fortune or the New York Times) than creating banner ads that sell for $50/cpm/. It is a whole new breed of buyers that need to be educated so they in turn can educate their clients.
Does anyone ever wonder how the guys at Oracle are going to get the fusion product delivered on time and in scope? It seems like the majority of the ex-HCM PeopleSoft and JD Edwards people, if not all except Row Henson, have departed the organization. We always wondered how people like Ron Hanscome and Glenn Tillman (and their teams) could even accomplish the massive amount of work they did when they just had the work of Oracle. Now with the work of all the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards people, we wonder how they can be doing anything except fighting fires.
It also appears that many of the end users of the PeopleSoft Kool-Aid are feeling that their Kool-Aid may be tainted after all, and are abandoning ship to SAP and Lawson. One of the real winners in this whole deal is TomorrowNow, who is selling licensing alternative maintenance deals at 50 cents on the dollar. Ironically, they are owned by none other than SAP. One wonders where Microsoft sits in all this. Several years ago I critized their acquisition of Great Plains and various other SME market players when they announced that their version 1 product offering would not be ready for another three years in 2005/2006. With no word on the street for version 1, it would appear that they are also not poised to enter the market anytime soon. This of course is leaving the medium and small business market wide open for the likes of Employease, Ascentis, Nuview, Spectrum HR, Kronos, HR Tech., Sapien, Sage, Ceridian and ADP.
