In a move that ups the ante in an increasingly crowded HR software market, IBM's recent acquisition of Kenexa brings Big Blue into a talent-management-software market that already includes Oracle and SAP, with those companies having acquired Taleo and SuccessFactors, respectively, earlier this year.

This latest acquisition has tremendous potential to shake up an ever-more competitive space, says Jason Averbook, CEO of Minneapolis-based HR consultancy Knowledge Infusion.

"If you combine Kenexa's data asset and IBM's focus on big data, solutions and the combination of knowledge, transactions and the impact that people [have] on the business," he says, "IBM has created a leapfrog moment in the true talent-management-solution space that an application vendor alone cannot provide."