Gunfight at the OK Corral
The "Industry's First Talent Management Shootout" at the HR Technology Conference® will feature the software-slinging CEOs of Authoria, Cornerstone OnDemand, Salary.com and Softscape. Beyond being a sign of the segment's maturity, the event will be bloody, as usual, though not fatal.
By Bill Kutik
The four vendor contestants for the "Industry's First Talent Management Shootout" at the HR Technology Conference® have just been named: Authoria, Cornerstone OnDemand, Salary.com and Softscape.
The four have wildly different heritages as software companies, which promise to make this Shootout of live software demonstrations -- the conference's 12th in eight years -- the most educational and exciting ever. But are you gonna believe the guy who organized them all?
The most significant thing may be being able to stage such an event at all! HR has been talking about the integrated talent-management-software suite for five years now. Can you open an HR magazine, blog or Web site without seeing it? But until recently, many vendors have been selling futures and vaporware.
Recognizing that reality, the HR Technology Conference®, which will be held this year at the McCormick Place in Chicago from Oct. 15 to 17, staged four smaller Shootouts. The first was based on performance alone, followed by performance integrated with compensation, then with learning and last year, recruiting. Now, finally, enough vendors are offering enough of the integrated applications to have a contest involving just about all of them.
If you're not one of the estimated 6,000 people who have attended a Shootout, the process and structure is very simple. For the third year in a row, Leighanne Levensaler, director of talent management research at Bersin & Associates, and I scripted three HR problems faced by employees and managers everyday. Very tough problems for any software system to handle.
Then the script was reviewed three times by 13 potential contestants, and revised by us until four companies were willing to step onto the stage and show custom software demonstrations solving the problems.
The other nine companies, for their own reasons, decided on their own not to participate. They were not eliminated in a competition: They opted out.
The consensus script has always been critical because it guarantees the value of the event: Seeing four vendors' systems doing the exact same thing back-to-back!
Any HR executive with budget could, with four phone calls, get competing salespeople to come to the office. But each salesperson would smartly show the product's competitive discriminators against the others. That gets so confusing that after two or three demos you wouldn't believe you had seen the same applications!
Not at the Shootout. There, contestants have to demonstrate the same functions required by the script or be disqualified. And each demo is presented by the company's CEO, who is unlikely to want to suffer that public embarrassment!
Then for each problem, the audience gets to vote for its favorite solution. I always call that the gladiatorial, blood-in-the-sand part. Guns, swords, software, votes ... whatever ... they're all equally deadly.
So here's some background and recent news about the contestants, hopefully without prejudicing anyone for or against the contestants in advance of the event on Oct. 16. They all have enormous, brand-name corporate clients and smaller ones, too. They all do things that no other software vendor can do -- but you won't see any of that if they follow the script:
Authoria started life as a knowledgebase company with a system delivering personal answers to specific employee questions, mostly for benefits communications. Changing direction, it built out its talent-management suite by acquiring several companies, including A.I.M. and Hire.com. It built a new technical platform to integrate all those applications, with recruiting being the first one rewritten for it and more recently, performance and succession. Compensation will be finished before the Shootout. It has no learning-management system (LMS).
Cornerstone OnDemand's first business was reselling online learning courses written by other companies. That led to creation of an LMS (what it's still most known for today) and eventually, responding to customer demand, to building all the applications of the talent-management suite, except for recruiting, where it will soon partner. Cornerstone is one example of the other road vendors have taken to creating the suite: so-called organic development with no outside purchases of companies and their existing products. It still sells 30,000 different learning titles.
Salary.com broke new ground in compensation by being the first company to offer small chunks of salary survey data free to employees and candidates, while still selling its global survey results to the traditional buyer: large corporations. That business naturally led to a compensation application easily integrated with their data and then a performance-management application, all written in-house, and the last just recently announced. It has no LMS and may have recruiting in the works. Salary.com is the only public company in the event.
Softscape made history by being the first software vendor to use the term "talent management" publicly in a now charmingly antique piece of
collateral
from 1998. That's appropriate because Softscape has had all the applications comprising talent management longer than any other vendor. You'll get to decide if they're better. As an older company, Softscape still licenses their software for installation behind the client's firewall, but the majority use SaaS (Software as a Service) hosted delivery, as the other three contestants do.
I should end by noting that some wise people in the HR technology world -- including Row Henson of Oracle and Jim Holincheck of Gartner -- have urged me for years to change the structure of the Shootout, from eliminating the requirement that the CEO be the presenter to eliminating the audience voting. But its enduring popularity for the last eight years has made me push their advice aside and stick with what has worked and been so popular.
I hope you're there, and I hope you agree.
HR Technology Columnist Bill Kutik is co-chairman of the 11th Annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition® in Chicago, Oct. 15 to 17. Read the full agenda and register before discounts expire in September at
www.HRTechnologyConference.com
. He is also host of
The Bill Kutik Radio Show
. He can be reached at
bkutik@earthlink.net
.
August 25, 2008 Copyright 2008© LRP Publications
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