ADP has a unique culture. Typically, they are known for their payroll products and little else. As they expand their footprint to go after the large HRO deals, the full talent management deals, they are clearly moving outside their comfort zone. What is interesting is the word on the street talking to current employees, ex-employees, and vendors who compete with them.

First of all … There are a lot of people from Virtual Edge and Employease who have already left or are looking to leave, which is normal after a merger. When you talk to these people it is predominantly about culture, leadership and future product direction.

When you talk to employees who are still there you are hearing about lots of upside opportunities, big demand for product and pipeline - and then they ask about other job opportunities. Why would they be interested in leaving (if they are making their quotas and things look bright)? Culture …

Talking to vendors who compete with Virtual Edge and Employease, their acquisition is the best thing that happened to the market, after Oracle of course … They are not seeing them in deals anymore.

There is a lot to be said about keeping a separate entity, brand and culture and not fully integrating some of these product lines into ADP. Both the Virtual Edge and Employease products are great. But they require a continual commitment to research and development and dedicated marketing. Many of the firms on an acquisition mode are experiencing similar issues. Losing top talent after an acquisition can be a major issue and requires special attention.

Purediscovery: Dave Copps and his team were some of the original brain trust behind Engenium, a very powerful search engine that supports many of the applicant tracking systems major firms deploy today. Although he left the firm several years ago, and Engenium was recently sold to Marsh/Kroll to support their litigation business, he has remained in the industry with his latest venture, Purediscovery. This is a next generation search tool and it will have a major impact on HR (both vendors and clients). Although it can act as your search engine (the same way many of the more common tools can like Verity, google, FAST, etc.), it actually is a semantic search engine coupled with some very nifty extra features.

1) Based on its semantic powers, when you enter a term like Talent Management, it will create a query cloud that enables you to pick from a series of words that may be reflective of talent (leadership, succession planning, recruitment, compensation management, and performance management) and user to specify more emphasis on certain terms like leadership and succession planning but no emphasis on performance. This will ultimately return better search results.

2) It can identify characteristics of search (i.e. … is it a person?) and build expert networks.

3) It can search multiple sites, think Monster, Careerbuilder, and Dice, and return the best candidates (resumes) de-duplicated.

I think it will have a major play in the following areas:

1) Applicant tracking systems and job boards (for resumes and job postings) as well as matching,

2) Company intranets and employee portals, and

3) Portals like HR.com (coming soon).