During the first week of May this year I had the pleasure to attend my first Cornerstone Convergence conference (CC16) in Los Angeles at the JW Marriott and attend the analyst briefing session. As I mentioned, this was my first event so I haven’t had the baseline to judge progression that I would with other events but I have to admit that I came away quite impressed with what I saw. My initial impressions of what Cornerstone does were well founded but what I witnessed in the announcements made me truly appreciate where they are planning to take this platform.
Cornerstone started as a learning company and did very well in that area. After that they bought a cloud based company for small business in 2012 (Sonar 6) and later Evolve in 2014. From there Cornerstone was firmly set as a cloud based Talent Management and Learning solution. How have they done? As of this conference they announced that they had 25M users in 42 countries, direct sales and service in 28 countries, sales in every geographic region and the top 3 customers in every vertical industry. Furthermore the average client now has 3 products (like recruiting and performance which includes full suites); only 30 % have only learning.
Pretty impressive stuff but now the big news; Cornerstone has now moved beyond Talent Management and Learning by introducing a series of products that moves them into being a full blown HCM provider. What have they added you ask? Cornerstone added a suite of People Analytics tools call Cornerstone Analytics Suite which are really impressive. They also added a centralized data repository called Cornerstone Link which I will outline below. Finally, they introduced Edge Integrate which is intended to provide easy integrations.
Here is the detail on each one:
Cornerstone’s move to Core HR
Cornerstone Link: This is a basic data repository with employee and management self-service. The target for this product is for companies that are getting too big to have their employee data in payroll but not big enough yet to need a full scaled HRIS like Workday, Oracle, Ultimate, Ceridian or others. This is a good fit for companies in the size of 750 to 1000 employees. It might also be good for older companies that have a 20 year old version of PeopleSoft and they want to get to a modern cloud solution but management doesn’t have the budget so this gives them employee and managed self-service and sits on top of PeopleSoft or SAP etc. A 3rd opportunity for Link is for franchises where the franchisor knows about their employees but know nothing about the franchisee employees.
This is a really interesting product but Cornerstone cautions that it isn’t a fully blown HRIS. They said that if they said they were an HRIS system they would need to include other things that they will never do like payroll, time and attendance etc. They say that they never have any intention of adding these components to the product and instead will rely on partnering with ADP for these competencies.
In short, Cornerstone is not trying to make a better HRIS, they just created something that makes HRIS maybe not necessary (think DocuSign doesn’t make a better fax machine; it just lets you do things that you used to need a fax machine for).
Cornerstone’s move to Analytics
Cornerstone Analytics Suite: This new suite is built on top of the Cornerstone’s talent data which it has been collecting for over 16 years across 25 million users globally, nearly 2,700 organizations across all industries and seven talent management dimensions – recruiting, onboarding, training and development, performance management, compensation management, succession planning and workplace collaboration. The Analytics Suite offers full predictive capabilities that include descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive.
The Suite is made up of 3 products: Cornerstone View, Cornerstone Planning and Cornerstone Insights
1) Cornerstone View: This is a new product with the tablet user in mind. It has been designed to allow a manger to gain insights into their employees to analyze their complete talent pool to find the best internal potentials they have for filling a current job opening or building a new team. According to Cornerstone Interactive data visualization tools allow managers to easily search filter and compare people by centralizing information from across the Cornerstone unified talent management suite. For example, users can find the right candidate to fill a position, select high potential employees for succession, and quickly compare succession metrics and performance reviews across select employees to reveal meaningful insights about talent pools. Filters also allow for a snapshot of employees across multiple categories such as location, division, performance and tenure.
2) Cornerstone Planning: Workforce planning is usually a very time consuming process of accumulating data from various sources in order to determine headcount and talent gaps. It becomes even worse when trying to marry financial data into the mix to come up with accurate forecasts and visualize cost impacts. This product is designed to streamline the planning and forecasting duties into a single application which should allow users an improved ability to make accurate and timely decisions around their workforce. Cornerstone says users can easily create, manage and execute accurate headcount plans through a simple and intuitive design.
Cornerstone Planning also helps users align finance budgets with HR’s workforce plan to generate forecasts, visualize cost impact and identify future talent gaps for meeting business goals. In addition, users can prepare and plan for company challenges, resource availability and goal achievement.
3) Cornerstone Insights: Offers real time predictive analytics with a variety of dashboards that help organizations discover actions for optimizing talent processes, simulate scenarios to view the impact of these actions and make prescriptive recommendations to address specific business challenges.
The dashboards are:
a. Career Mobility Insight dashboard which is intended to help managers gain a better understanding of both traditional and non-traditional career path movement and the factors that contribute to optimal career mobility.
b. Learning Optimization Insight dashboard identifies factors and simulates actions that drive course registrations and completions.
Cornerstone’s move to PaaS
Cornerstone Edge Integrate: Extending capabilities to an HCM suite is a highly desirable capability because after all, most companies use multiple platforms to accomplish their targets. Jumping from one interface to another can be time consuming at the very least, and truly cumbersome when data from one source needs to be married with data from another. Edge Integrate has prebuilt integrations and intuitive configuration tools to make fast end-to-end integrations with other applications. Cornerstone says that they develop, maintains and supports all Cornerstone Edge prebuilt integrations. Look for this area to grow over time but from what we saw in the demo, the integrations were extremely quick and simple.
Conclusion
Cornerstone has made some bold moves to add all kinds of functionality to their product and clearly they are now quite capable of playing in the broader HCM space with the other well-known players. I am sure that we will see much more development and additions in the future as their customers adopt the new features and provide feedback but now it’s time for Cornerstone to execute. I say well done.
