Acrobatics at HR Technology® Conference
The Cirque du Soleil acrobats above the Taleo booth were not the only high-fliers at the recent HR Technology® Conference & Expo, which itself reached record heights of attendees, exhibitors and sheer excitement. But don't believe me.
By Bill Kutik
The Cirque du Soleil acrobats above the Taleo booth were not the only high-fliers at the 10th Anniversary HR Technology Conference & Expo
®
.
The event itself reached new heights in paid attendees (up more than 30 percent), show-floor exhibitors and just sheer excitement. The last, confirmed by the delighted e-mails I've received from participants in the last week or so.
Among my favorites was this: "I loved the vendor-neutral environment. And the mix of topics would allow anyone to come back year after year and get value every time."
Of course, I am the most biased source imaginable, since I have programmed the event for its entire 10-year history, along with HRE Editor-in-Chief David Shadovitz. That means we create the sessions and no one talks from a conference stage unless we choose them.
And as the e-mailer seemed to understand, we never sell speaking slots to vendors.
You can read excellent coverage of the public events elsewhere: on
HREOnline
and on blogs by Knowledge Infusion's
Jason Corsello
and
Jason Averbook
. So let me tell you about some of the more private goings-on in Chicago.
Before the conference opened, Workstream hosted an elegant Tuesday evening party at a local arts center, complete with hired models adorning the staircases and the tiniest canapés imaginable. All for an elaborate announcement of Version 7.0 of its talent-management suite.
While some of the applications still run on separate databases, the version number is somewhat misleading since this is the first truly integrated product Workstream has offered after buying 16 of them over the years. And it marks their official entry into what increasingly seems like the only race in town.
Over at the Ritz-Carlton, the technology investment group of Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets had an equally elegant party, but with no models or formal announcements. RBCCM is just one of more than a dozen investment bankers and private equity firms that roam the HR Technology
®
show floor every year looking for new young companies to buy, sell, roll up, take public or whatever. All without spending a single dime on the conference.
RBC is better than most, buying several tickets, but the other money guys just graze the floor with big bucks in their pockets and free expo-only passes around their necks. Can't help thinking they should start contributing to maintaining their lucrative field of dreams.
Very early Wednesday morning, Vurv gathered industry analysts and press on the show floor to announce Vurv Perform 4.0, a completely integrated performance-management offering including competency-based job modeling, career development, succession planning and compensation management.
Most impressive were its built-in 70,000 content and competency objects (many acquired from InScope). I've long thought that embedded content will win the talent-management derby.
But back to the parties. Wednesday was the main night, with fierce competition for attendees, most invited two weeks earlier. Two vendors held them on the Navy Pier: SAP and SilkRoads.
I could only attend the SAP party, where David Ludlow, senior vice president of Global HCM Strategy, was enjoying some of his last days in the United States before moving to Germany for six months. He was discrete, as always, about the purpose of his relocation (he already visits Germany from his Palo Alto, Calif., office for a week every month), except to say it was a secret talent-management project. What else?
Most of SAP's HCM developers are in Germany, where Ludlow, who also used to run product management, can work more closely with them. His replacement in that role, Hendrik Vordenbaeumen (no one here even tries to say his last name), is also based in Germany. So the entire team will be together to do whatever.
Over at the Intercontinental Hotel, Orrin Broberg, CEO of the newly renamed Employee Continuum (formerly e-Continuum), was clutching his new Top 10 Products of the Year Award from HRE for Overture Version 4.0, his product for job branding, and assessing and hiring salespeople using video simulations. The top two executives from his recruiting-process-outsourcing partner, Veritude, CEO Robert Lopes and Executive Vice President Diane Shelgren, were there to help him celebrate.
I had to miss Lawson's elegant press and analyst dinner for the second year in a row. But its just released next generation Strategic Human Capital Management suite, combining core HR functionality with strategic HCM capabilities using Web services and Service-Oriented Architecture, was fully on display at Thursday's HCM Battle against Oracle and Workday.
Instead, I was at Knowledge Infusion's open party at the Sheraton's Chi Bar. KI is riding the current talent-management wave perhaps better than any other HR consultancy of any size, certainly to be accelerated with the recent hire as vice president of Elaine Orler, a five-time presenter at the HR Technology Conference
®
and "Ms Recruiting Systems," in my book.
Averbook, CEO of the consultancy, a great presenter and salesman, has garnered KI about 150 clients for strategy, transformation and vendor selection in less than three years! At his hit Friday session on Web 2.0 technologies, I said KI could become for HR in the next decade what Andersen Consulting was in the early '90s (if you remember its power and influence back then), minus the implementations that made Andersen's vendor selections so dodgy.
That is, if Averbook and co-founders Heidi Spirig and Stavros Liakakos, all Gen Xers formerly at PeopleSoft, keep working 24/7 and don't screw it up. OK, if you find the Andersen comparison hyperbolic, at the very least KI will have the influence of the old Hunter Group, if you remember that name, too.
Finally, my personal favorite for the second year in a row: the PeopleSoft Reunion Party on Thursday night. If you spend a lot of time with vendors, as I do, you quickly realize that, with PeopleSoft, Dave Duffield created the most powerful business alumni network in recent history.
With its former HR software employees now spread out among dozens of technology firms (major clusters at Workday, Taleo, Oracle, SAP, Fidelity, KI and the former Employease among others), these folks will be marrying each other, finding each other jobs, consulting for one another and cross-pollinating our industry for another two, maybe three decades. Having a lot of them in one room is better than a college reunion.
And there will be more of them -- from software pillars other than HR -- on Nov. 13 in San Francisco, when PeopleSoft's former house band, the Raving Daves, holds a reunion concert. And just who was clever enough to schedule that right in the middle of Oracle Open World, with its 42,000 attendees?
I'll be there. As I hope you'll be at the HR Technology Conference
®
next year, Oct. 15 to 17, at Chicago's McCormick Place. If you attended this year, please write and tell me what you loved and (shudder) whether you hated anything. I really want to know.
HR Technology Columnist Bill Kutik was co-chairman of the 10th Anniversary HR Technology Conference & Exposition
®
in Chicago. Attendees can access all program materials at
www.HRTechnologyConference.com
. He can be reached at
bkutik@earthlink.net
.
October 22, 2007 Copyright 2007© LRP Publications
|
Print
Email
Write to the Editor
Reprints
