HR Technology Chicago September 2010
In true fashion, that only Bill Kutik could pull off, this years HR Technology event was buzzing with loads of new news and deals being consummated and is truly the only HR tradeshow that is run for entertainment purposes primarily. Although the major announcement was the IPO filing of Cornerstone, the floor was a buzz with rumors of who was buying whom. The booths just keep getting larger but the number decreases as more and more mergers are on the way. How many double 20 * 20 can we have in a single year? This happens when one firm (Taleo) buys someone (Learn.com) and inherits 2 booths. It is definitely the go to show for business development professionals as well as start ups with venture capital and private equity people strolling the aisles. If you were one of the few Buyers or HR professional that did manage to walk the aisles you were probably bombarded by vendors. We expect , the numbers are something along the lines of 80 vendors for every 20 Hr professionals there. LRP and Bill have definitely managed to add the entertainment and show business factor to the show and did an awesome job of bringing in twitter feeds and first generation mobile apps to the show. It is truly entertainment to see Bill in action.
SO many great icon’s have left this industry in the last 2 years Jim Spoor (Spectrum), Deb Besemer (Brassring) , Kevin and Kent Plunkett Salary.com , Tod Loofbourrow Authoria, Nicole Stata (Deploy) . Ironically most of them from Boston which has lost so much of its depth in HCM .
For the first time in 10 years I did not spend 2 days in the pressroom, but focused on looking for old friends and new technology on the show floor.
So what’s new…. Shortly after the show the relationship with Salary.com and Kenexa was consumed. A definite gap in the Kenexa product line, this will help broaden their product expertise, otherwise they were playing the don’t step in my booth , we can’t talk yet game.
It was nice to see John Long and Ezra Schneier long time merger and acquisition experts from First Advantage back in the game with their recent acquisition of Workstream. It appears that someone finally out maneuvered Mullarkey as after the acquisition was completed he was officially shown the door. They also confirmed he was a very BAD DUDE.
Last year at HrTech , I had meet the new CEO of Sumtotal (Barb) who promptly left shortly after, (not my doing by the way) . After the meeting I left saying, that job and company is nothing like what she is telling me, I wonder if she got sold on the career and bought off more than she can handle or does she really believes what she is saying ? It concerns me that Sumtotal is on their 3rd CEO with no experience in HCM experience in 2 years. With many of their people (especially sales) actively on the market after the new comp plan was launched, this could be major overhaul to the entire team. Although the recent acquisition of Softscape will broaden their footprint, this will be one deal that will be very hard to integrate. The different cultures, development methodology and strategies are only a fraction of the issues. Kudos to Dave Watkins for selling at an opportune time and growing the business from scratch, he will be glad he was not required to stay with the deal. So if the new management thinks the Softscape platform in its current state can become the goto platform for learning and performance , I think in addition to the issues above they also need to take off their rose colored glasses and stop drinking their own Kool-Aid.
A lot of the buzz was the recent Taleo acquisition of Learn.com which at 5X sales (18-20M in pregap revenue 10M in debt, heavily vested in by VC’s) for a firm that would have been bankrupt if left alone, set the benchmark for many more Best of Breed solution providers that are being heavily courted. Sometimes that last man standing wins as firm get desperate to built out product lines. SO yes Successfactors really needs learning and is rumored to be heavily courting Geolearning who has been in the market for a while but never manages to cross the finish line. Plateau needs Recruiting ( Icims, Cyptiva or Talent Tech ?) , many still need social networking / employee portals ( to be competitive to Cornerstone, Silkroads, and now Saba) . Plateau as a LMS play also looks interesting 74M in revenue is very large compared to many of the players in the market. The reality is not one of the players has the full suite but the ones that come closest are definitely Silkroads , HRsmart and Cornerstone.
The Bersin presentation was also enlightening to show that market success story Successfactors could have such low rating across so many disciplines such as customer satisfaction, yet still be the top selling, highest valued firm in the space.
Lars sure has done an amazing job at hyping and building the market and growing top line revenue, which is so great for validating the market. Lets hope Adam @cornerstone has a fraction of this capabilities and luck in successfully getting his IPO out.
SP what’s hot on the floor. Analytics and Workforce Planning. Still a wide open vertical but finally we can have the tools to measure. Love what Orca Eyes announced as well as Ethority … Analytics on demand… Quick reporting and benchmarking with action plans. What if I increased headcount ? What does this mean. Finally a low cost ( or no cost ) alternative.
The add ons for the talent space were also well received . Loved the extended search capabilities of Sovren (some of the ip behind the monster new 6th sense search), the JobVite social media tracking (but having a hard time understanding why Talent Acquisition vendors / Talent Management vendors have not built this.) and finally the social media monitoring for firms like Social Intelligence that monitor and mitigate risk for employee social media monitoring .
The proliferation of iphone apps … Love the Kronos and various mobile apps that let people trade shifts, check in and out from their iphone. ( thanks to Vortex for creating this market and OEM their product to many of the Workforce Management Vendors.) Even Manpower is launching an app that lets you look for , interview and prescreen temps. How cool is that!
On side notes : Jason Avebrook @ Knowledge Infusion … you did an awesome job filing in for Naomi Bloom . Gerry Crispin … thanks for letting Job boards live another year.
