Who Will Be the Leading Talent Management/HCM Platform in the Next 5 Years?
A couple of weeks ago we opened a poll @InsideTMT asking the question "Who will be the Leading Talent Management/HCM platform in the next 5 years?" The choices are Oracle/Taleo, SAP/SuccessFactors, Workday, Salesforce.com/Rypple, Cornerstone OnDemand, ADP, and Other.
The poll will be open for 30 days and will close on April 15th. The last time I checked SAP/SFSF and Oracle/Taleo were neck and neck with about 29%, and Workday and Salesforce.com each with 19%, and the remaining votes split between Other, Cornerstone, and ADP.
But the surprising figure: Over 16K votes have been cast!
Very pleased with the volume of traffic, I showed this to my family. My 18 year old daughter said, "Dad, you know that voluntary response online polling has no validity."
She is right. I watched the numbers pile up. The first two weeks only about 50 votes were cast, split pretty evenly, although I recall the "Other" category might have been in the lead. The next 15,950 were cast in the last two days. It started out an SAP avalanche, and before I went to sleep Monday night they were over 90% favorites. When I woke up, miraculously Oracle/Taleo was making a comeback. Eventually Workday and Salesforce piled up some votes to stay in contention. You can barely see CSOD or ADP in the pie chart.
The only valid conclusion I can draw from this is how many employees from each company read the email that suggested they vote in this poll. I am pretty sure no one at CSOD or ADP has seen it yet, but they still have a couple weeks to jump in.
So where does this leave us regarding who will be the leader in 5 years? I put these six companies on the list because I believe they all have a shot and it will boil down to execution. Here are a few thoughts on each:
Oracle/Taleo: There is no question Taleo has the most robust recruiting platform for large global enterprises. The question is, what will Oracle do with the rest of it? Will they continue to build on the Taleo platform or create some Frankenstein combination?
SAP/SFSF: When SAP made the statement that SFSF would be their HCM in the cloud, and Lars would lead it, you got the clear vision for where they are going. They already have a god start with Employee Central, the big question is how seamlessly does the rest of the platform come together with various code bases. They have been a little light in recruiting, but the Jobs2Web acquisition helps.
Workday: It has been clear what Dave Duffield set out to accomplish is in his grasp. Enterprise HCM in the cloud with some solid Talent Management functionality. No doubt they forced the hand of SAP and Oracle to make their acquisitions. The question is what will they do about Recruiting and Learning? Continue to partner until they can build it, or will they buy?
Salesforce.com: If you believe that a Platform as a Service model is where the HCM space is headed Salesforce.com has a clear advantage with a Dreamforce of tens of thousands of developers. They have social and SaaS in their DNA, it will depend on how quickly they add other domain expertise to the picture. Rypple was a good start.
Cornerstone: 100% organically developed, and arguably the top of the list of the remaining stand alone suite providers. I think with the recent shifts, they now have plenty of time to get their newly launched recruiting product deep enough to compete. But the question becomes, what will they do about HRMS? Stay a bolt on, or build that out too?
ADP: Probably the dark horse in all this, but you cannot discount a company that has 570,000 customers. They have enough under the hood and cash for acquisitions to put together a complete package. They won't be vying for the Fortune 500, but could corner the market in the SMB space.
I suppose there are plenty of people out there who think some other vendor could rise to the top. Am I missing anyone? Who would you put on the list?
Comments (11)
Ward Christman
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Guest
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George LaRocque
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I am not sure you know what you're talking about. Sure they bought Sonar6, but that will be maintained as a separate product to serve the SMB market. Similar to when Taleo bought Recruitforce.com and made it their Business Edition. Cornerstone's flagship talent management suite has Performance Management, Succession, Compensation, Learning, and a recently launched Recruiting module, all internally developed on the same platform. That's organic. Not sure what there is to be confused about.
Pat House
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Anon