Is Anyone Buying the Talent-Management Suite?
After two years of chatter and millions of dollars spent on software development or acquisition, new vendors are selling the talent-management suite sooner than expected, though mostly in pieces and only rarely in one gulp.
By Bill Kutik
1
For more than two years, the chattering classes of analysts, columnists, consultants, vendor marketing executives and others have talked about the integrated talent-management suite being the hot thing in HR. Certainly it will be a major topic of discussion at the
October 5 analyst panel
at the HR Technology
®
Conference in Chicago.
The well-informed have known it's really nothing new. More than six years ago everybody called it "strategic HR." Four years ago, it became "HCM" or Human Capital Management. Under whatever name, it refers to the non-administrative (or partially administrative) applications that many HR departments have been using for years: Recruiting, Performance & Compensation Management, Succession Planning, Career Planning, Learning and (much less frequently) Competency Management. What's key to its value is the new integration.
In the face of siloed HR departments where no one executive is in direct charge of all those applications, a dozen vendors have built out full and partial suites, sometimes not fully integrated, but functioning. Softscape, HRsmart and Monster already claim to have them all. Authoria and Vurv are building out (and acquiring) furiously. SuccessFactors and Halogen have added Compensation and Succession to their Performance Management, with SuccessFactors building its own Recruiting. Taleo has announced intentions to add Performance Management and Succession. Cornerstone OnDemand, KnowledgePlanet, Plateau and Saba have all added Performance Management to their learning-management systems and will compete together in a
Shootout
of those integrated applications at the conference.
After background conversations about their specific sales figures with executives at three suite vendors -- Authoria, Softscape and Vurv -- it is clear that all are selling more than their original application, but rarely are customers buying the whole suite at one time, instead two or more products. Which indicates the concept is spreading. All three are selling lots of Performance Management, but none in the numbers reported two months ago by the original best-of-breed vendors SuccessFactors and Halogen. (See "
Performance Management Sells Like Hotcakes
"). Compensation is also popular.
The definition of a company buying the entire suite is subject to vendor interpretation. Authoria likes to label companies as suite customers with three or more products, even though they sell six. Softscape points to customers with eight or nine, even though they sell 23 separate modules. Vurv's Compensation product was "generally available" only in August. Depending on your definition, Softscape, which has been in the suite business longer than any of them, seems to have the largest number of suite customers.
Two large companies have bought substantial chunks of vendor suites at one time and both will be presenting at the HR Technology Conference to explain their strategy.
The Hess Corp
. is an SAP HCM customer and bought Authoria's entire suite, which does not yet include Learning Management. Reportedly, others have as well.
Seagate Technology
, an Oracle HCM customer, bought all the basic pieces of the Talent-Management Suite from Softscape, except for Recruiting, which it bought from Taleo.
Those purchases alone come a year earlier than I would have predicted when the chatter first started. Clearly, the talk has turned into a trend. But like the earlier challenge from best-of-breed Recruiting vendors, both SAP and Oracle are responding by devoting substantial resources to integrating the talent-management applications within their own HRMSes in a way that HR never cared about before but obviously is beginning to want to have now.
HR Technology Columnist Bill Kutik is also co-chairman of the 9th Annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition in Chicago, Oct. 4 through 6. Registration is still available at
www.HRTechnologyConference.com
. He can be reached at
bkutik@earthlink.net
. ###
September 25, 2006 Copyright 2006© LRP Publications
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