I’ve been writing and speaking a lot about the Future of Work and how it requires an evolution in the way we engage and inspire the next generation workforce. New thinking and approaches to Talent Mobility (the practice of engaging, developing, retaining and deploying organizational talent) are required if organizations are to thrive in the future of work.

This new mindset extends from pre-employment considerations (how can we improve the skills in the labor market to improve employability) to post-hire practices which include relinquishing the “command and control” mentality so that employees are given the tools necessary with which to drive their own mobility forward.  (My POV:  Social collaboration tools become critical for organizational success in this area, as they enable mentoring, transparency in projects and foster the conversations that will drive employee engagement, knowledge sharing and, ultimately, mobility within the enterprise).

Mercer published their study on this topic earlier this year, Talent Mobility Good Practices.  The study uncovered four key issues facing organizations globally, as summarized in the Infographic below.

Infographic by Mercer Insights

Your POV

Are you contemplating a shift in your talent mobility strategies?  Add your comments to this blog or send us a comment at Y@ConstellationRG.com.

Please let us know if you need help with your talent mobility strategy efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

• Reviewing your talent mobility and other people process strategies
• Connecting you with other pioneers
• Sharing best practices
• Designing a next gen apps strategy
• Vendor selection

Founded in 2002, Socialtext provides enterprise social networking tools – including microblogging, wikis, profiles, social profile matching and other tools to connect employees and information – to more than 6500 mid-sized and large enterprises across the globe. Their customers include such recognized brands such as Getty Images, Symantec, Walgreens, Weight Watchers, Warner Bros. Entertainment, McGraw Hill and Rutgers University.

Bedford Funding is a private equity firm that has been solely focused on investments in the Human Capital Management technology marketplace. Peoplefluent was formed in July 2011, when Bedford combined its three previous acquisitions (Authoria in 2008, PeopleClick in 2009, and Aquire in 2011) into a consolidated offering for integrated talent management under the new Peoplefluent brand.

Socialtext is joining the Bedford Funding family, but will remain an independent entity and remain under the leadership of current CEO Eugene Lee. The strategic investment will infuse Socialtext with funding to drive expanded development and accelerate strategy execution. Operating as an independent entity, Socialtext will be positioned into Peoplefluent’s more than 5000 customers, while continuing to support and sell into customers utilizing other enterprise systems including ERP and Talent Management suites, as well as Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Connections.

Bedford’s strategic investment in Socialtext places a strong provider of enterprise social networking in the same family as Peoplefluent, and as such, plans are emerging that will integrate the two platforms to enhance employee collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Peoplefluent today provides recruiting, onboarding, performance, compensation, succession planning, workforce communications and business intelligence to more than five million users across 5000 customers in 214 countries and territories across the globe. While Peoplefluent has emerged as an innovative leader in mobile talent management, it has lagged in the emerging market of social talent management processes. Earlier this year, Peoplefluent announced its move into social learning with the acquisition of Strategia Communications, a small provider of Learning Management Solutions based out of Canada. Now, with the incorporation of Socialtext into Bedford Funding, the remaining social gaps can be bridged with integrations between the two platforms.

We look forward to being the growth engine in Silicon Valley for Peoplefluent to extend and enhance its Talent Management offering with Socialtext as its social layer”   – Eugene Lee, Socialtext CEO.

Integrating the Socialtext and Peoplefluent platforms is expected to drive significant growth into Peoplefluent as it benefits from competitive social capabilities delivered through close collaboration between two entities of Bedford Funding. But will integration be enough?

As I have written before, the question remains whether or not next generation experiential systems (as opposed to transactional systems or systems of engagement) can be assembled through integrations, or if they require the incorporation of social technologies into the core technology platform for more advanced business support and analytics. Vendors are taking their stand on either side of this “debate” and for now, the path forward for Peoplefluent appears to be one of integrated social technology. Many of their customers today are already using 3rd party social collaboration tools such as Yammer, Jive and Microsoft SharePoint, and so integrations with Socialtext should be straightforward and rapid. The unique opportunity facing Peoplefluent is the ability to leverage Socialtext to transform people processes with social; the question is whether or not transformation can come through integration.

My POV:

Bedford Funding has been very specific in their positioning of this transaction, citing that the investment is to enable accelerated development and leadership of the Socialtext platform and bring social collaboration into its Peoplefluent platform. The deal is clearly a ‘win’ for all involved:

• Peoplefluent customers interested in Socialtext capabilities, as there will be greater emphasis on sales, integration and support between Peoplefluent and Socialtext solutions;
• Socialtext customers, as the investment infuses Socialtext with the funding necessary to grow development and innovation;
• Bedford Funding, which now has a comprehensive portfolio spanning human capital technologies including the social networking technology necessary for comprehensive collaboration and workplace transformation;
• Other TM/HCM vendors adding social to their portfolio benefit as well, as this transaction continues to raise the visibility of social technologies in people processes. Most Human Capital Management and Talent Management vendors are currently adding social capabilities into their suites, either through integrations to social technologies (such as Socialtext, Yammer, Jive, Chatter and others) or by incorporating these capabilities into their technology platforms (Saba, Oracle Fusion, and literally tens of startups and niche providers in social performance, social goals and others). As the social enterprise emerges, HR and business leaders will find increased technological support for harnessing the power of collaboration and connectivity to improve how work gets done, everyday, across the enterprise.

This transaction should light a fire under any HCM vendor sitting on the fence regarding whether or not to integrate or incorporate social with their offerings. For the enterprise buyer, it is further evidence that social networking is moving into the enterprise to create the social enterprise. If your organization has not yet established its strategies around use of social technologies, today’s news should serve as a rallying point for prioritizing those conversations.

For another important perspective on this acquisition, please review the post by my Constellation Research colleague, Alan Lepofsky.

In the many write-ups on the announcement, I saw a heavy focus on the functional capabilities enabled by this new offering. Integrated into Salesforce, users can give “Thanks” (recognition, badges) to other users from within the Salesforce.com applications (i.e., while reviewing customer service on an account, or from an account page or from sales leads). Custom badges can be awarded and viewed across the organization to recognize special achievement or praise, breaking down departmental silos and fostering employee engagement and alignment. And all of this activity is captured and visible within the Salesforce Chatter activity stream.

This is useful – and cool – stuff, don’t get me wrong.

But what I’m more excited about is what this means for the person profile: How the Salesforce.com profile is now extended with formal and social data giving them a more complete view of the individual. Salesforce.com has joined the growing pack of players vying for control of the person profile.

The Profile Wars are on.

I wrote on the profile implications of this  acquisition back in December when Salesforce first announced their intentions for Rypple:

Even more important is the anticipated advances of the salesforce.com person model. The goals, feedback, badges and other elements of social performance suite driven by the Rypple solutions become additional attributes of the employee profile. The acquisition will drive these additional attributes into the salesforce.com person profile, which in turn will drive additional value to other Salesforce applications….The opportunity for Salesforce to grow and leverage this extensive profile beyond the enterprise relationship should appear as something more than a blip on LinkedIn’s radar screen.

In that post, I gave a “heads up” to LinkedIn, because LinkedIn’s strategy to own the portable professional profile will now be met with new competition from Salesforce as they they grow their efforts in this area. LinkedIn today delivers an employee profile that rivals that of many HRIS systems in regard to understanding employee related data. Beyond capturing education data, awards, certificates and other data, the LinkedIn profile also captures the professional network of the individual, including references and feedback from that network.

Salesforce’s Mark Benioff has repeatedly stated his intention to own the “social profile’ of his users, but with their announcement to move into the Human Capital Management (HCM ) arena, it’s clear their reach – and the potential value-add – will be much broader. For Salesforce, this isn’t about just owning the “social profile” of the individual – it’s about owning the comprehensive profile (social, formal, explicit, implicit). As Salesforce builds out its HCM offering and in turn captures additional profile elements (including but certainly not limited to data such as job title, goal and  performance review data, compensation, skills and competencies), Salesforce’s emerging people profile will provide a much richer view into the talent of an organization.

Aspirations or Reality?

Many aspire to deliver this enriched profile, but few are actually delivering it today. In Part 2 of this post, I’ll highlight those that are making progress in this area, as well as well as explore the emerging “Holy Grail” of the profile: portability.

What do you think?

Does Salesforce.com have a leg up on the competition with regard to creating and owning the employee profile?  Do you believe the profile can be ‘owned’ by a single platform vendor or will it ultimately be ‘derived’ through the convergence of many applications in the cloud?

Up Next:  The Profile Wars (Part 2):  Who’s Delivering the Portable, Social, Professional Profile?

Related links:

Salesforce Launches Rypple Integration, Site.com Services (eweek.com)

Salesforce.com: Rypple Beats SAP, Oracle HR Suites (informationweek.com)

More and more companies are realizing the value of business technologies delivered through the cloud, and a growing number of HCM vendors both new and well-established are taking action to claim their seat at the SaaS HCM table. Completing its acquisition of SaaS Workforce Management provider Dayforce earlier this month, Ceridian has now solidified its investment in a next-generation platform and becomes the latest entrant into the HCM SaaS marketplace for end-to-end people processes.

“Our goal is to become the leading HCM provider with a single SaaS application; one employee record, one user experience and zero interfaces,” said CEO Stuart Harvey during an industry analyst briefing last month. “Last year, our realignment and initial partnership with Dayforce provided the groundwork for Ceridian’s transformation from a service bureau to a leading SaaS HCM provider. “

Background

Serving more than 25 million employees across 130,000 clients, Ceridian has a 20+ year heritage in providing payroll and HR services and software (which now spans HR, payroll and tax, benefits, workforce management, health & productivity, and talent and performance management.) In 2011, almost $1B of their $1.5B in revenues came from this segment of their business. The remaining $500M in revenues is attributable to its pay card services – an important option for providing electronic funds disbursement to employees without traditional bank accounts – as well as other gift and incentive card services.

With adoption of SaaS technologies on the rise and mounting pressure from players like ADP, Ultimate and Workday, Ceridian made its initial move into the SaaS HCM marketplace in February 2011, when it announced an investment in Dayforce and launched its new “InView Workforce Management” solution on the Dayforce SaaS platform. Strong market acceptance (more than 500 new solutions sold in one year, with over 200 customers live) and positive experiences with the technology and architecture turned a partnership into an acquisition, and morphed the co-developed InView solution into Dayforce HCM, Ceridian’s new platform for end-to-end SaaS-based HCM solutions.

Ceridian is not abandoning the HR/Payroll service bureau market; in fact it will use their ability to provide these services on top of their SaaS platform as a competitive differentiator.

The SaaS HCM Platform

The Dayforce HCM platform currently supports comprehensive workforce management, self-service, analytics and HR processes. Already in development for release this year are solutions for payroll and payment services, expanded HR self-service, and benefits administration. Also included in the current platform: basic elements of compensation management that enable users to implement pay changes as required. A more complete compensation offering is targeted for delivery in 2013, as are additional solutions for talent and performance management.

With its “multi-view architecture,” users of Dayforce HCM can access its applications on the devices and platforms of their choice, including Apple computers, desktops running various versions of Windows (including the upcoming Windows 8), and on mobile devices and tablets running Android, iOS or HTML5 frameworks. This year will also see the delivery of a new Android-based time clock, called Dayforce Touch, the beta version of which was previewed last October at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. The user experience across many processes is highly intuitive, visually engaging and streamlined. Below are two images that hint at the engaging UI for performance-based scheduling as well as emerging mobile scheduling on Windows 8 (with its new “Metro UI”).

Differentiation through Process Transformation

I had the opportunity to preview the latest capabilities of the Dayforce HCM platform last month at Ceridian’s industry analyst event. Their user experience is exceptional and certainly will be a factor in driving migration to and adoption of the platform. But what I was most impressed with was their highly innovative approach to time and pay processes. The Dayforce HCM team, led by its Founder and now President of Ceridian Dayforce, David Ossip, is reimagining payroll and time & labor processes as a single solution, not as an integration of two separate functions.

In rethinking theses two processes as one, the Dayforce team is able to deliver the following unique and compelling new value propositions to its clients: Zero data redundancy. Zero integration issues. Elimination of batch processing in payroll. Almost immediate time to close.

This single system approach also enables Dayforce to eliminate the estimated 70% overlap in implementation efforts between time and pay processes, speeding up the error identification process which itself can save a company several days of staff time per week. The development team is also leveraging in-memory processing to facilitate real-time exception analysis and other analytics. Customer feedback is enthusiastic and efficiencies are already being noted in the new solution, such as the ability to process 40,000 paychecks in just 5 minutes (down from roughly 4 hours with previous approaches.)

Beyond administrative efficiencies, end-users benefit as well. For example, employees will be able to clock out of work and immediately be presented with their period-to-date earnings, gaining immediate insight into their prospective paycheck. (Does this make you uncomfortable? If so, you can turn this particular feature off, as well as others, as flexibility is a core design tenet of the system, along with user experience and process acceleration).

Continued Value for Current Customers

Ceridian has communicated a roadmap of continued investment and innovation for its current customer base. Planned investments for 2012 across the Ceridian products include advances in online COBRA premium submission and surcharge rebates, health and welfare product improvements, ongoing compliance and regulatory investments, enriched self service and expanded business intelligence. Business intelligence improvements include new Value Dashboards – due to ship this month – enabling a client’s self service access to view metrics and other data that communicate the usage and value a client is receiving from their Ceridian products and services.

Ceridian is also ensuring its applications are integrated to the Dayforce HCM platform, but according to Larry Dunivan, Ceridian’s SVP Products and Strategy, this does not signal a forced march to the new platform: customers will be in control of when they migrate (at least for the foreseeable future).

My POV

Ceridian is transforming itself from a Service Bureau business to a SaaS suite provider of end-to-end HCM solutions. Its acquisition of Dayforce, with the proven success of its first joint Ceridian/Dayforce officering, “InView Workforce Management,” provides a strong foundation upon which to build the rest of the offering. Timely execution against the delivered roadmaps will be important for Ceridian if it is to retain and ultimately migrate its extensive customer base to this new platform.

Is today’s offering compelling? Absolutely. Core HR, payroll, time and labor: these applications don’t usually inspire a lot of passion in users unless perhaps they are the administrative users (and often the passion is of the negative sort). But the focus on intuitive processes, rich user experience and anytime/anywhere accessibility makes for a highly engaging experience. And the new Dayforce Touch device will be an especially welcome alternative to traditional time clocks. (However it, too, enters a competitive market, with Kronos having just launched their next-gen device, Kronos InTouch, last November).

Will Dayforce HCM compete against other end-to-end SaaS HCM providers (those providing HR, Payroll, WFM and Talent Management)? Its unique approach to consolidated Payroll and Workforce Management, coupled with HR and analytics on the same platform, will give it a competitive edge over other WFM and Payroll providers. However its current release plans through 2013 will not make it the undisputed leader amongst SaaS HCM providers.

While Ceridian Dayforce HCM will leapfrog the competition with its unified approach for time & pay processes, it will be at risk with gaps in talent management (as plans for recruiting and learning capabilities are unclear) and in the quickly growing area of social processes.

In discussing social capabilities for the roadmap, David Ossip refers more to collaboration than social, and does so in terms of “allowing multiple individuals to work on a record together.” This is quite a bit different from the “social HR” messaging of other SaaS vendors that articulate the advantages of developing the enterprise social network, quickly identifying and finding experts, or connecting people to information and others in the enterprise to support and accelerate getting work done. With more and more companies exploring and adopting enterprise class social technologies, Dayforce runs the risk of being a laggard where they’ve otherwise led with innovative approaches in user experience.

Regardless of these gaps in the roadmap, Ceridian has already proven the market viability of its new platform, as evidenced by the rapid uptake of the InView offering, now the foundation of Dayforce HCM. (In fact, 50% of InView clients were “net new,” meaning they were not formerly Ceridian clients.) As Ceridian continues its transformation to a leading SaaS HCM provider, its focus on intuitive and efficient user experiences (which include process transformations such as the payroll/workforce management approach) will be a competitive differentiator. Ceridian’s ability to leverage its service bureau heritage to offer more than just technology and deployment best practices to its clients will likewise be a factor in its long term success.

While SAP, Oracle and others in this space are aggregating technologies to assemble their SaaS offering, Ceridian, via its Dayforce HCM platform, is one of the few that is delivering a pure-play, natively developed solution. It is a platform that should be on the watch lists of any organization looking for best-in-class workforce management today, and those seeking a SaaS-based, end-to-end solution for HCM processes  in upcoming years.

Related articles

• Ultimate Software Advances a People-Centric, Collaborative Platform (nextgeninsights.com)
• Seven Ways Infor Is Advancing HCM (Hint: Lawson is But One) (nextgeninsights.com)
• Gartner: SaaS market to grow 17.9 percent to $14.5 billion (infoworld.com)

In this inaugural show I framed Social Talent as the ”Next Wave of Awesomeness”, and had a healthy conversation/debate with Rob Garcia of UpMo and Meghan Biro of TalentCulture on why you should care about these emerging trends, the risks of ignoring them and even where to focus initial efforts. (Spoiler Alert: this is SO MUCH MORE than just a buzzy topic, and doing nothing is not an option).

You’ll find a full recap of this first episode and video replay here.

The format of the Social Talent Show is conversational and engaging, yet also highly informative.  Each month it covers topics across Talent Collaboration, Talent Mobility, Culture, HR and Social Talent.  I’m especially impressed by the lineup of speakers, which run the gamut of vendors, influencers, practitioners, gurus, radicals, visionaries, bloggers, analysts and others.  Community is building around this show, and exciting conversations and debates around Social Talent are growing.  I’m following the Social Talent Show.  Are you?

Skip down to my POV if you’re familiar with Ultimate and the major announcements at Ultimate Connections. Otherwise please read on.

Background

If you’re not familiar with Ultimate Software, it is a leading provider of SaaS-based Human Capital Management solutions. In business since 1990, Ultimate serves more than 7 million employees across 2300 customers. The client list includes a veritable “Who’s Who” across a wide variety of industries with companies such as Callaway, Subway, Wente, Quicken, Major League Baseball, The Container Store, Jockey International, Adobe Systems and Google among the roster. Ultimate has demonstrated impressive growth, with 2011 revenues of $269M, up 18% from the previous year, and expected 23% growth to $330M in revenues for 2012.

In 2002 Ultimate pivoted from an on-premise solution to a SaaS model. That year it launched SaaS-based UltiPro, and became one of the first vendors to provide SaaS HCM during a time when many still questioned the viability of delivering HR and Payroll in the cloud. It continued selling on-premise licenses through 2009, and today has fewer than 300 customers still utilizing that platform.

Ultimate has two offerings depending upon employee size: UltiPro Enterprise for organizations with 1000 or more employees, and UltiPro Workplace (a somewhat scaled down version of Enterprise) for companies with 250-999 employees). Uptake of the SaaS products beyond HR and Payroll has been significant, with 60% or more of new customers including one or more talent modules in every deal.

Ultimate today provides payroll for US and Canada; it doesn’t have a truly global payroll solution – nor does it aspire to. Their strategy is to deliver global HR and compliance support through UltiPro while facilitating integrations for local payroll solutions where clients pay employees in countries outside of the US and Canada. Multinational employers are fully supported through this approach.

Over the years, Ultimate has displayed a refreshingly focused approach: it doesn’t want to dominate the world; it doesn’t endeavor to take on Oracle or SAP and become the next global ERP. Ultimate’s focus remains solidly on providing end-to-end people management systems for predominantly US- and Canadian-based organizations. It is not a payroll service bureau, yet 65% or more of its business comes from organizations leaving the service bureau solutions of ADP and Ceridian. As demonstrated over the years and at last week’s conference, this focus does not preclude technology advances and innovations: Ultimate continues to roll out new functionality including advanced analytics, and is incorporating disruptive technologies such as mobile and social into its offering.

Ultimate Connections Recap

The Connections conference itself was a three-day opportunity for Ultimate’s customers and partners to connect and share experiences and future directions. During the event, Ultimate maintained a steady drum beat on the interconnected themes of the Cloud Ecosystem, a single System of Record, and the importance of having a Person Centric focus.

Cloud Ecosystem

The challenge of operating within a cloud ecosystem for many clients, according to Chief Technology Officer Adam Rogers, is achieving complete “connectedness”; figuring how to connect all the components together. This is a burden Ultimate wants to address for its clients. In addition to continued investments in web services and single sign on to connect and access core system data, Rogers also introduced planned upgrades to their Managed Vendor Services (MVS) offering. The MVS offering is designed to ameliorate the many frustrations around client to vendor integrations (such as 1:1 integrations from cloud-based employer HCM solutions to on-premise and/or proprietary benefits carriers). The offering provides standardized integrations, managed by Ultimate and its partners, so that achieving ‘connectedness’ across the many technology platforms necessary to conduct business can be more effectively managed in the cloud. Eight thousand such integrations are managed through MVS today, and following upgrades in infrastructure and new approaches, this MVS service will expand to take on significantly greater integration tasks for Ultimate clients.

System of Record

With an increasingly vigorous talent management offering that spans talent acquisition, onboarding, performance and goal management, career development and succession planning, all delivered on the core HR/Payroll foundation, Ultimate has the necessary components to be the single, comprehensive System of Record for all workforce data.

Ultimate is leveraging this expanded system of record to deliver increasingly advanced analytics across the full people management spectrum. CTO Rogers spoke briefly of their predictive analytics capabilities becoming more developed in the near future as the employee record is augmented with the rich data resulting from talent management components. In fact, their 2012 roadmap is replete with new functionality that will drive greater insight into individuals across the enterprise.

Person Centric

In what was probably the most exciting news of the conference, Ultimate announced its partnership with Yammer, a leading provider of enterprise social networks, to bring enterprise collaboration into the Ultimate platform and advance its people-centric focus with new consumer-grade usability and functionality. The planned initial integration is surprisingly deep, extending the employee system of record with social attributes and enabling Ultimate to deliver what equates to early versions of Social Performance and Social Goal Management in addition to enabling real time employee collaboration.

Ultimate has some experience with social networking, as they’ve been using their UltiPro Ideas portal for several years now to interact with customers and drive new product direction. In fact, in 2011, just over 25% of the new features introduced were driven by this online client community. Until the Yammer announcement, however, there had been little evidence of commitment to social networking integration within the bulk of the UltiPro product lines.

The new Ultimate/Yammer integration is slated to launch in Spring 2012, and includes Yammer Activity Stream integration into the UltiPro Talent Gateway so that teams can follow social networking conversations without leaving the UltiPro framework. Company-wide announcements including job postings are also shared simultaneously with the Yammer feed, increasing transparency and accelerating information sharing across the enterprise. Another aspect of the bi-directional integration is the ability for employees to give “Praise” to one another, and to have this social feedback appear and become available for analysis on the employee’s profile within the UltiPro suite. It is with this feature that Ultimate begins to enter the Social Performance arena, as the social feedback can also be readily incorporated into the employee’s perforamnce review. Additionally, in an early demonstration of Social Goal Management, users will have the ability to tag accomplishments within Yammer and have those milestones captured within UltiPro’s goal management functionality.

In this image, the manager is able to view social conversations from Yammer collaboration directly embedded into the UltiPro Talent Gateway, as well as drill into feedback and praise that is now connected with individuals' profiles.

These social enhancements (viewing activity streams, providing praise), are also visible and actionable through the UltiPro Mobile iPad dashboard.

The Yammer integration is but one of many areas of investment aimed at answering the common end-user challenge of “what’s in it for me,” which gets to the heart of user engagement. Other user engagement and people-centric initiatives are similarly underway, including Ultimate’s focus on delivering a “responsive web design” – namely a targeted experience that auto-adjusts its layout/configuration based upon the device being used (different screen sizes, mobile or tablet). Engagement was the subject of a panel I spoke on at the Connections event, and the ability to connect to others and perform work tasks when/where/how the individual desires, including through social and mobile technologies, was a large aspect of that discussion.

My Point of View:

The Human Capital Management (HCM) space is especially hot right now, with massive consolidation taking place across all types and sizes of vendors, and with an influx of innovative new vendors at the edges. The push is on to move processes to the cloud to capitalize on its many advantages for vendors and clients alike, while social technologies are emerging to augment and transform traditional people processes into ones which support the more natural ways work gets done in today’s highly connected environments.

The UltiPro solutions deliver solid capabilities across a unified platform spanning HR, Payroll and Talent Management in a pure SaaS-based offering. While today they may not achieve best-of-breed status within the talent management components, the trade-off between deep functionality and fully integrated solutions, according to studies by Constellation Research, is one that organizations are increasingly willing to make.

Ultimate’s addition of Yammer for social networking integration was a late but important move to bring collaboration into their suite and deliver a next generation solution to market. The performance and employee engagement processes will benefit from this integration immediately, with more to follow in subsequent releases. However in the area of Recruiting – the talent process where social media is most commonly adopted – there is still no real evidence of social integration, a gap their customers gave voice to frequently during the recent conference. Ultimate will need to overcome this deficit soon if it is to have a sustainable offering in this area.

The Yammer partnership is non-exclusive, which means that Ultimate customers utilizing other social networking technologies are not forced into using yet another collaboration tool. The integration between Ultimate and Yammer is quite deep, but Web Service APIs are also being developed to facilitate interoperability with other 3rd party social networking tools (although the resulting integration is not expected to be as rich as the co-developed work between Yammer and Ultimate). The availability of these web services also mitigates the risk of Yammer being acquired and Ultimate needing to find a replacement partner.

Was Ultimate’s approach to collaboration – partnership vs. natively embedded into the platform – the right one? Businesses are moving from transactional systems to systems of engagement, driven in large part by the rich user experience and intuitive designs of consumer technologies (Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, others). Can engagement and experiential systems be assembled through integrations – essentially through a connected network of networks – or must they be developed together with decision support, transaction support and social enablement all part of the DNA of the platform? Vendors are starting to take their stand on either side of the equation, and Ultimate and Yammer have taken the side of integration. It is a viable approach for these enterprise systems as long as the integration is well defined and supports collaboration and information sharing where it happens most naturally – in the context of getting work done.

For organizations (especially those in the mid-market) evaluating their HCM options, and which are ready to explore the opportunities of social collaboration, Ultimate should be on their shortlist.  I’ll continue to watch Ultimate with interest to see how the collaboration components continue to evolve, and to see if and how they leverage the newly available social data within their business intelligence framework for metrics and predictive analytics.

Related articles

• Moving from Transaction to Engagement (HBR Blog Network)
• Getting to Workforce Planning 2.0 with Social Network Analysis (nextgeninsights.com)
• Ceridian Claims its Seat at the SaaS HCM Table (nextgeninsights.com)
• Seven Ways Infor is Advancing HCM (Hint: Lawson is But One) (nextgeninsights.com)

In today’s networked economy, connecting people to the information they need, and doing this when, where and how it’s needed, is a critical requirement for business agility. Email may still be the primary form of communication in corporate business today, but more and more individuals are communicating and collaborating through next generation technologies such as instant messaging, posting updates to walls and activity feeds, creating and posting videos, tweeting, conversing and sharing content in social forums, and any number of other means of sharing and accessing knowledge.

These informal methods of collaboration and engagement, coupled with the more formal learning concepts of training courses, certifications and learning content, have been converging into what the market now recognizes as Social Learning.

What is Social Learning?

At its most basic concept, Social Learning is simply the process of engaging with others to learn and share knowledge. It’s been estimated that 70-80 percent of learning is informal: accidental, ad hoc or unplanned learning that happens outside the traditionally structured learning environments. The rapid pace of change in business today requires learning agility, and  formal learning programs cannot keep pace in this area. Technologies have emerged to enable “social learning”, facilitating the creation and sharing of knowledge across a networked community and bringing real-time community feedback, collaboration and context to the learning experience. When these social learning environments are combined with the advanced capabilities of next generation unified communications suites, everyone wins.

How UC Capabilities Extend the Social Learning Value Proposition

• Effectively engage a multi-generational workforce. Social Learning combines formal and informal approaches to learning, to meet the learning styles and needs of all individuals. At its heart are social networking technologies, which include such capabilities as maintaining a social profile; updating activity streams; rating, tagging, bookmarking and sharing content. More and more UC platforms are incorporating social networking, bringing the richness of voice, video and online collaboration together with social collaboration and engagement to meet the diverse needs of today’s multi-generational workforce. Enabling social learning environments with the latest capabilities of next generation unified communications will drive increased employee engagement, accelerate the flow of information and return higher value to the business.
• Achieve highly interactive virtual learning, on the go. With the advances in Unified Communications, virtual learning environments can now be augmented by integrated voice, data, video and collaboration to bring the richness of a classroom experience to the desktop or laptop of the learner in ways never before possible. No longer must a learner log into a web conference tool with one device, access the audio with another, and sign into yet another technology tool for real-time collaboration; the latest in Unified Communications capabilities are increasingly integrated with social learning environments to streamline all of these activities to support the most effective virtual learning environments possible. Whether conducting an informal meeting to share knowledge or training hundreds or more users on formal processes, the virtual learning experience can be highly interactive and engaging, and increasingly, can be achieved on the go with mobile devices. The availability of high-fidelity video and telepresence further enriches the experience to provide an immersive, face-to-face environment beyond traditional video conferencing.
• Quickly identify and engage with experts at the point of need. Imagine an experience where an employee is reviewing a slide deck shared in the enterprise collaboration site, and questions arise about the content. Advances in messaging and presence detection enable the employee to see whether or not the author is online and available, and further allows him to reach out though chat, voice and/or video to engage with the author directly. Not only has this process fostered rapid information exchange and ad hoc learning, but it has connected two individuals who are now more likely to share and engage in future collaboration scenarios. After collaborating with the author, the employee adds his own comments to the content, rates and tags it, thus accelerating the value and effectiveness of this content for other enterprise learners who may be seeking this subject matter in the future.
• Reduce content creation costs and burden, through crowdsourcing. The ease with which videos, knowledge documents, audio recordings and other learning objects can be created in a UC-enabled social learning environment enables organizations to create a new channel for content development: crowdsourcing.  Any employee in the enterprise with access to a video-enabled phone or web conferencing tool can quickly create content that is readily shared and leveraged in both formal and informal learning initiatives, greatly easing the corporate learning organization’s burden of content creation.
• Improve corporate learning outcomes with  Video. Video is likely to become the preferred mode of learning within the enterprise by 2013. In May 2011, YouTube reported approximately 48 hours worth of video was uploaded very minute. The ease of content creation and sharing experienced in the YouTube environment has increased expectations for similar capabilities within corporate social learning environments, and the advances in UC will help bridge that gap. Why bother? Because studies show that video learning can improve outcomes by 30% or more, in addition to improving employee performance, increasing engagement, and fostering company brand and culture.  Video is highly important to learning initiatives, and integrating HD Video with collaboration tools will further advance the success of social learning initiatives.

In business today, there are many ways to get the job done, and we no longer work in a one-size-fits-all environment. Next generation unified communications accelerate the capabilities of Social Learning platforms, transforming how people collaborate, communicate, learn and share knowledge.

The benefits I’ve described above are but a few of the many ways in which social learning initiatives are enriched by collaboration and communication advances in a unified communications platform. If you would like to speak with me or another member of Constellation Research about developing your social learning or unified communications strategies, we’re happy to help. Contact me at y@constellationrg.com and I’ll ensure you’re engaged with the right members of the team.

Related articles

• Unified Communications Trends for 2012 (constellationrg.com)
• For young workers, the future is here already (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Unified Communication Expands Workforce Talent Pool (informationweek.com)

Let’s face it: in previous years, if you were thinking about leading Human Capital Management (HCM) technologies, the name “Infor” just didn’t bubble to the surface. A collection of more than 30 acquisitions, Infor’s HR capabilities were largely delivered in the context of industry vertical-focused solutions, bringing solid HR functionality into the suite, but certainly not on any watch lists for best-in-class HCM technology. Last year, Infor acquired a market leader in HCM, Lawson Software, and the market held its breath while it waited to see if, indeed, this was “the end of Lawson HCM.”

It’s time to release that breath.

Infor is investing heavily in their HCM portfolio, and in fact positions growth in HCM as a strategic initiative for the organization. The last 6 months have seen a series of product and technology releases across the Infor and Lawson platforms. Infor has also been busy under the covers, making operational changes to improve efficiencies, speed innovation, improve scale, and refine their go to market approach.

I have spoken with executives and HCM leadership across Infor over the past few months. At the highest levels, CEO Charles Phillips speaks of Infor’s focus on delivering complete industry suites, delivering functionality with a consumer grade user experience, and “reimagining the management of software” for maximum flexibility. These tenets are manifest in the current and future directions articulated by the Infor HCM leadership team, headed up by Tarik Taman, General Manager HCM.

With the strength of Lawson HCM at its core, coupled with the latest Infor-led technologies for interoperability, collaboration and mobility, Infor is well on its way to capitalizing on its market position as the third largest ERP provider in the world, second only to SAP and Oracle.  As Infor prepares for its first user conference following the Lawson acquisition (Inforum 2012), it’s worthwhile to review the latest technology and infrastructure investments – I’ve summarized seven below – that are laying the foundation for growth across Infor HCM.

1. Infor10: Infor’s Platform for Innovation

September 2011 saw the launch of Infor10, Infor’s new platform for innovation. Infor10 is also the umbrella brand covering all of Infor’s current enterprise applications (including ERP, CRM, HCM, FIN, business intelligence and others); the ION suite of middleware; the Workspace graphical client; its Cloudsuite application suite; and its latest mobility platform, Infor10 Motion.

An in-depth analysis by my colleague Ray Wang, published at the time of the launch, provides details across these Infor10 components, all of which are applicable to the Infor HCM strategy moving forward.

The most immediate and critical of these components to the HCM strategy is the release of Infor ION: Infor’s platform for the social, mobile and flexible enterprise. Infor believes the path to the future lies in a loosely coupled architecture that easily accommodates change and plug-ins. “Enterprises need the flexibility to change components when needed and without loss of integration” said Phillips, explaining why he stopped Infor’s previous plans to standardize on Microsoft technology and instead embrace more open technology stack. This is where Infor’s ION platform comes in. Infor ION is the glue to Infor’s overall strategy – and the counter maneuver to Oracle’s Fusion middleware and SAP’s Netweaver middleware. The primary focus of Infor ION is to ensure complete communication and interoperability across all Infor solutions, as well as connecting Infor applications to third party solutions.

Integration is a lynchpin for success to HCM technologies, and as such, getting the Infor HCM solutions to leverage the ION platform is a top priority. Integration of Lawson HRM solutions with the Infor ION platform is scheduled for release next month, with the Lawson Talent Management suite to follow.

Infor10 also includes a new mobility platform, launched in January 2012, called Infor10 Motion. This platform plugs into Infor’s ERP, CRM, SCM and other applications through Infor ION, bringing real-time, mobile solutions to users when and where needed. While Lawson already has a collection of ERP and HCM mobile applications, further efforts across Lawson HRM, Talent Management, Enwisen HR Service Delivery and Infor Workforce Management have mostly been sidelined in favor of leveraging this new Infor10 Motion platform in the coming year. The trade off for customers is less rapid delivery of new mobile solutions in exchange for improved Infor10 interoperability via the new Motion platform.

2. Lawson HCM: The Destination Platform for HCM

Infor acquired mid-market industry leader Lawson Software in July 2011. The Lawson HCM suite is comprised of Lawson HRM (which includes HR recordkeeping, benefits, payroll, absence management, employee and manager self service and select vertical functionality), Lawson Talent Management (including performance, goals, compensation, succession, learning, talent acquisition and competency management), and the Lawson HR Service Delivery platform (acquired from Enwisen in 2010, delivering knowledgebase, case management, on- and off-boarding and Total Rewards).

These Lawson HCM solutions and Infor’s Workforce Management solution (acquired in 2007 from Workbrain) combine to form the Infor Human Capital Management Suite. According to Tarik Taman, General Manager of Infor HCM, Infor’s strategy is to make this the destination HCM platform for their more than 70,000 customers, through continued innovation and improved interoperability across the HCM platform and by leveraging the Infor’s technology and infrastructure investments.

Following the acquisition, Infor added more than 90 headcount to the Lawson HCM division and significantly ramped up its development efforts. The first post-acquisition release occurred in December 2011, with the delivery of the Infor 10 Lawson S3 release(Lawson S3 10), delivering advances in functionality, integration and user experience.

The Lawson S3 10 release was not without its challenges. For example, customers are vexed by questions of when to use Lawson’s Smart Office (LSO) capabilities vs. Infor’s new Workspace, both of which provide collaboration capabilities but functionality and deployment options (desktop vs. mobile and web based) vary. Additionally, integration between the modules still lags, but starting in March 2012, a series of releases will begin to change this. Taman and members of his leadership team laid out an aggressive HCM roadmap beginning next month demonstrating Lawson HRM integration with Infor ION; Infor Workspaces extending across Talent Management; ongoing vertical enrichment and expansion; and later this year, mobile advances on the new Infor Motion platform across all the Infor HCM solutions.

3. Infor Workforce Management: Completing the HCM Suite

Upon the Lawson acquisition, one of the top identified priorities was the rapid integration of Infor Workforce Management (WFM) solution – which provides comprehensive labor management support and optimization – with the Lawson HCM solutions. The first of such integrations is targeted for delivery in March 2012, and should be on display at the upcoming Inforum 2012 conference in April. Infor also sees tremendous synergy between the Lawson HR Service Delivery platform and the Infor Workforce Management technologies for targeted industries and processes, and as such, deeper integrations between these two technologies are planned in the near future.

4. Lawson HR Service Delivery (Enwisen): Unifying HCM with Knowledge and Process Support

To date, integration between the Lawson, Enwisen and Workbrain platforms has been limited. The going forward strategy is to leverage Enwisen as a unification tool to wrap all the HCM applications together with knowledge and process support, seamlessly moving users across the various solutions with single sign-on. This makes sense for many organizations, as knowledge-enablement has proven to reduce costs and streamline processes while enabling HR to refocus its efforts on providing higher-value services to the business. However, this model isn’t necessarily warranted for all sized organizations, it doesn’t address the different look/feel of the Lawson, Enwisen and Workbrain technologies nor does it bring in the collaboration/social aspects available from the Infor10 platform.

In upcoming months, I will be looking for greater clarity on planned use of the Infor ION platform within this Enwisen unification strategy. Meanwhile, the ERP-agnostic Enwisen solution has 80% of its customers using SAP or Oracle HCM today; a great Trojan horse into hundreds of competitors’ customers as the value proposition for Enwisen and the rest of Infor HCM is enriched.

5. Complete Vertical Solutions with Leading Talent Management

According to Infor, 42% of ERP customizations are performed to address industry gaps. Infor seeks to minimize or eliminate the need for such customizations through a vertically focused go-to-market approach spanning sales, products and services. The Infor HCM roadmap includes continued vertical specialization across all HCM solution components. One area of potential mismatch, however, is with Infor Workforce Management, where more than 50% of its customers are in the retail industry, yet there is no associated strategy to build out retail-specific capabilities within Lawson HCM applications.

Infor is also committed to Lawson Talent Management as a competitive stand-alone offering in the market, moving Infor beyond its legacy of “good enough” HCM within its vertical suites. Infor spoke of their continued innovations in this area as well as improving integration with 3rd-party systems of record, reinforcing Infor’s message of flexibility, while also solidifying the up-sell opportunity of Lawson Talent, Workforce and HRSD solutions into Infor’s more than 75,000 clients regardless of core HRM solutions in place. (Note that the Workbrain and Enwisen solutions are already ERP/HR/Payroll system agnostic).

6. Infrastructure Investments for Scale and Value-Add

Infor hired almost 500 additional developers in 2011, bringing the total to 3400 individuals worldwide who are developing applications at Infor. They also centralized their development in common technology areas to increase agility and innovation, allowing the solution areas to staff up with deep industry and domain expertise. Infor has also created a new Value Analysis (VA) team, whose job it is to build out a reference architecture for customers and prospects so that a personalized ROI analysis can be developed, and in the future, upon which industry benchmarking will be provided. The vision is not unlike that of SAP’s Value Engineering organization, and this will be a beneficial service for Infor HCM clients over time as the team and HCM engagement experience grows.

7. “Purposefully Hybrid” Deployment

Infor has adopted a “purposefully hybrid” strategy, allowing customers to deploy in the cloud, on-premises or a combination of the two. Phillips sees only advantages in this hybrid approach and says this is the company’s long-term strategy to ensure maximum customer choice, not a stopgap measure on the way to pure Cloud.

There are obvious complexities for a hybrid model, and Infor is not immune to them. Product overlap is one immediate challenge. The Lawson HR, Lawson TM, Enwisen (SaaS only) and Workbrain solutions comprise the “destination platform” for Infor10 HCM, but additional HCM solutions continue to be offered that pull product, sales, services and support resources away from the core:

• Infor HCM Anael HR, HR, payroll and time and attendance suite
• Infor HCM SmartStream: employee self service for benefits and payroll
• Infor10 HCM iEnterprise (Infinium), HR, payroll, benefits, self service suite

Overall, the hybrid strategy enables Infor to sell into a broader market than pure-play SaaS providers, as many customers are not yet ready to embrace HCM in the cloud. (However, the lack of an on-premise offering does not seem to be slowing the growth rates of vendors like Ultimate Software and Workday.) When competing against SAP and Oracle, Infor is at least on equal footing in this area, as their support for both on premise and cloud aligns with the approaches adopted by SAP, Oracle and others as they manage the realities of solution platforms comprised of multiple acquisitions. Success can follow if they are able to keep on premise customers current with the latest releases, maintain a rapid pace of innovation and truly make solution interoperability seamless and painless for their clients (still an aspirational goal at this point).

The Bottom Line

The changes effected across operations and products over the past 12-18 months seem to be working for Infor, as evidenced by their claim in January 2012 of 17% license growth and four consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, with growth in the HCM area especially strong. (Note Infor is a privately held enterprise and as such does not publish financial statements.) Infor is touting an operating model that allows them to remain private, but they did not rule out going public when the time was right. Charles Phillips also indicated that additional acquisitions would take place, most likely in the area of deep industry requirements.

It’s been fewer than 8 months since the acquisition of Lawson, not much time to make significant changes in product, but enough to demonstrate continued commitment. Infor has a good start in this area, and delivering on planned releases in upcoming months will be an important confirmation of that commitment.

In April, I’ll be at the Infor Lawson Users Conference, Inforum 2012, where I’ll look forward to more details and proof points demonstrating how the Lawson HCM suite is capitalizing on the Infor10 suite innovations deliver the next generation of Infor HCM. If you are not attending Inforum 2012 yourself, I am happy to serve as your proxy, taking your questions forward and providing a follow-up post after April’s event.

Related articles

• News Analysis: Infor Launches New Era with Infor 10 (constellationrg.com)
• Key Executives Leave Lawson Software After Infor Acquisition (pcworld.com)
• Infor details mobile strategy, launches new apps (infoworld.com)
• Infor revamps support services, heightens competition against SAP, Oracle (infoworld.com)
• Ultimate Software Advances a People-Centric, Collaborative Platform (nextgeninsights.com)
• Ceridian Claims its Seat at the SaaS HCM Table (nextgenisights.com)

In a conversation with my colleagues today as we reflected on various vendor briefings, the question was raised, “Do all vendors think their competitive differentiators are unique?”

By definition, “differentiation” should imply unique.  It should also imply “beneficial”, as in “what we offer uniquely is also beneficial to your business.”  Yet how often have we seen a solution looking for a problem, or an over-engineered piece of functionality that is differentiating, but not necessarily better.

See if this scene from the cult classic “This is Spinal Tap” doesn’t remind you of at least one conversation you’ve had with a technology provider. It’s a good reminder to keep challenging the “what” and “why” of those claims of differentiation.

This week’s Tuesday Tidbit comes from ”Spinal Tap”

Are you prepared for the future of work?

Thriving in the future of work requires evolving traditional ways of thinking. It involves moving beyond standard “hire to retire” processes to those that “engage and inspire.” It demands an evolution from transactional systems to engagement and experiential systems, bringing context to people-centric applications to drive agility and flexibility. In the future of work:

• Traditional job structures expand to embrace the flexibility and mobility demanded by the newest generation of workers. Concepts such as co-working and freelance talent pools are becoming more prevalent, driving new approaches in not only in how we hire but also how we manage the workforce.
• Powered by gamification platforms, performance and goal management shifts in practice from command and control to open and engaged.
• The employee profile gives way to a portable talent profile encompassing formal and social components for unparalleled talent insights and contextual relevancy.
• Learning and development paradigms evolve to  continuous and social knowledge enablement across the enterprise.
• Organizational practices expand beyond top down succession planning to continuous and bottom-up talent mobility practices.
• Understanding spheres of influence becomes more important than the visualization of organizational hierarchies.
• Critical workforce measures move beyond efficiencies and effectiveness to engagement and outcomes.
• Movement of talent management and collaboration processes into the cloud brings new consideration for access, interoperability, security, scalability, innovation and more.

The above are just a few of the transformations currently underway, bringing unique challenges and opportunities to organizations as they evaluate where to embrace changes, and where to ignore them, based upon their business hierarchy of needs.

Join us for an Executive Workshop

Join me and my colleagues from Constellation Research on Monday, March 19, in Miami, Florida, as we discuss these and related trends in a complimentary 1-day workshop: “From Concept to Reality: The Future of Work.”  At this workshop, experts across social, mobile, talent, analytics and cloud computing will share their latest research findings, discuss trends, and lead interactive discussion around the strategies and use cases for next generation people processes and technologies. This is a complimentary workshop open to all business leaders interested in engaging in an interactive discussion around the cultural and technological trends affecting today’s business environment.

Join us at the beautiful Loews Miami Beach Hotel on Monday, March 19 for this informative, engaging and not-to-be missed workshop by registering here.

This morning, SAP and SuccessFactors, an SAP company, issued a press release in which their unified Human Capital Management (HCM) product roadmap was unveiled.  The primary message is that SAP has adopted a hybrid strategy for HCM:  the SuccessFactors portfolio for Cloud HCM, and the current SAP ERP Human Capital Management portfolio for on premise. Details on this and other facets of the announcement are discussed below:

Employee Central becomes the HR System of Record for the cloud.

SuccessFactors Employee Central solution is the go-forward core human resources (HR) offering in the cloud. Backed by more than 25 years of experience from SAP in core HR, the solution is poised to grow exponentially as SAP will boldly invest in it. SAP will continue to offer the SAP® ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) solution on premise for core HR, now with regulatory support for 51 countries around the globe and an innovation road map of significant investments in functionality, user-experience, mobile and in-memory technology capabilities in the future.

My Point of View (POV):  Employee Central, used today by about 100 SuccessFactors customers, will be rapidly built out to meet the demands of a fully globalized core HR solution in the cloud.  A significant number of SAP resources will be redeployed to this effort.  It is important to note that an end-to-end cloud HCM offering is still elusive, however, as there is no immediate clarity on how payroll, benefits and workforce Management will be delivered in the cloud. According to David Ludlow, SAP’s Group Vice President of HR s Solutions, “These will all be considered as part of the acceleration within Employee Central. We need to look at what kind of re-use of the SAP payroll [and other] assets can have in the Cloud offering.” SAP will want to leverage the 51 payroll country solutions and 31 partner solutions existing today, but the “how” is still to be determined. The interim strategy is for SAP to deliver pre-packaged integrations between the SuccessFactors cloud offerings and the SAP HCM on premise offerings to bridge these gaps.

Core SAP HR customers will continue to receive support and innovations across many areas,  but with so many SAP resources redeployed or co-assigned to the Employee Central and other SuccessFactors initiatives, the anticipated pace and volume of innovation will decline.  One previously announced advance that is set to continue:  running SAP ERP HCM on SAP HANA for improved processing speeds and analytical capabilities.  Additionally, a brief reference is made to mobile investments but without details. Today SAP has a mobile store, where many SAP-built mobile applications are available for download, including six across the SAP ERP HCM platform; how this will be leveraged and augmented moving forward is to be determined.

SuccessFactors is the go-to platform for Talent Management.

For talent management, SuccessFactors Performance Management, SuccessFactors Compensation Management, SuccessFactors Recruiting and SuccessFactors Learning Management with social learning from SuccessFactors Jam will be the go-forward solutions. Talent management components from SAP ERP HCM will be continued with selected innovations for the next decade.

My Point of View (POV):  With this announcement, the real future of SAP HCM is placed squarely on the shoulders of the SuccessFactors Cloud platform.  SuccessFactors talent management solutions will be positioned to all new HCM customers and to current SAP customers who have not yet invested in talent management.  Current customers of SAP Talent Management products will continue to receive support and “selected innovations” through 2022, but those seeking significant innovation in those areas will need to look to the cloud (and do so expecting a different user experience as well as integration requirements).  SAP will assist customers in migrations or cloud adoption with pre-delivered integration support and services (full details are planned for announcement in May, at SAP’s SAPPPHIRE Now conference).  As expected, and in alignment with this new strategy, development on SAP’s Career onDemand has ceased.

As with the limited data on mobile, the path to social HCM is incomplete: SuccessFactors Jam is the solution for social learning in the cloud, but broader leverage of this or other social networking tools such as SAP Streamwork remains unclear.

Business Intelligence and Big Data are Prioritized

Analytics will continue as an important focus area within both SAP ERP HCM and the SuccessFactors product portfolios, leveraging significant assets such as SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics, SuccessFactors Workforce Planning, the SAP HANA platform and solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio. People analytics will be revolutionized by putting SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics on SAP HANA. Together SAP and SuccessFactors can make unparalleled aggregate HR benchmark insights available in the cloud to hundreds of thousands of customers. The combination of SuccessFactors software and SAP HANA is one of the key priority areas for development of the BizX Suite, as it will help increase customer value by dramatically speeding existing processes, enabling access to large amounts of data in shorter periods of time and providing real-time access to information tailored to individual requirements.

My Point of View (POV):  Both SAP and SuccessFactors have significant business intelligence assets, some overlapping, and all of which can be bolstered by the SAP HANA platform.  Unfortunately the good work done to date on SAP’s Strategic Workforce Planning (the first HANA-enabled SAP HCM solution) has been stopped, and those efforts will shift instead to augmenting the SuccessFactors Workforce Planning solution. Customers can expect a hybrid BI model moving forward, accessing different capabilities through a combination of on premise and on demand offerings from a combination of SAP and SuccessFactors-led technologies.  Leveraging SAP HANA to improve performance and enable real time analytics within the SuccessFactors BizX suite makes complete sense, and aligns to SAP’s plans to run SAP ERP on HANA by the end of 2012.

Open Integration for All Customers

SuccessFactors will continue to support an open approach to connecting with third-party solution providers. Approximately fourteen percent of SuccessFactors customers currently run their systems side-by-side with SAP. In addition to providing enhanced value for joint customers, SAP and SuccessFactors will accelerate the development of integration solutions with third-party solution providers. For SAP customers, the two companies intend to deliver integration packages between the two offerings: Cloud-based talent, core HR, recruiting, learning and social solutions, and workforce planning and analytics solutions from SuccessFactors; and On-premise core HR from SAP.

My Point of View (POV):  Integration is a key focal point, not just for SAP and SuccessFactors, but also across an increasingly complex HCM landscape, and so accelerating offerings in this area is paramount.  The planned integration packs between SuccessFactors and SAP are obvious requirements.  In keeping with their fist comment about openness and interoperability, and in recognition of the complex HCM landscapes of most organizations today, SAP would be well served to productize these 3rd party connectors as well; ease of interoperability is really the secret sauce in software (and platform) as a service.

One approach SAP has used in the past to manage rapid implementation, migration and integration is through their Rapid Deployment Solutions  (RDS), which consist of pre-packaged software, services and content.  Today there are three RDS solutions for SAP HCM, and new RDS solutions should follow quickly in support of those customers using solutions spanning the SuccessFactors cloud portfolio and SAP on premise HCM products.

Bottom Line:

Acceleration has been the consistent theme of this acquisition, from the first day it was announced, to the “Day 1” customer letter from Lars, to the press release issued this morning.  Acceleration of SAP cloud offerings.  Acceleration of synergies between SAP and SuccessFactors technologies.  Acceleration of customer value. The strategy articulated today by SAP and SuccessFactors provides a clear and immediate path forward for HCM customers and prospects.

For SuccessFactors customers, it’s all upside,  with accelerated investment across the entire portfolio. Where gaps exist in the portfolio (such as the current lack of a  cloud based offering in global payroll or benefits), integrations will be fully supported by SAP.

For SAP customers, the communicated strategy presents a more complex result. To their advantage is SAP’s commitment to supporting both on premise and cloud HCM, offering customers choice between the two or a hybrid model;  a SAP-supported path to best of breed talent management from SuccessFactors; and improvements across in-memory processing and business intelligence (although some of this may be available only in the cloud). The obvious downsides include reduced pace and volume of innovation across the current  SAP on premise solutions and the fact that the clock has started ticking on SAP on premise talent management.

There are still many questions (pricing, depth/quality of the integration and RDS solutions, specifically which “targeted innovations” will find their way into the on premise offerings, to name a few).  As SAP writes at the end of today’s press release, “Execution is the Difference.”  SAP will need to execute quickly, especially in the area of integration, to ensure this is a winning strategy for all of its customers, not just customers of SuccessFactors.

Filed under: Cloud, M&A, SAP, SuccessFactors, Talent Management Tagged: analytics, Apps Strategy, Big Data, Business Objects, Cloud, HCM, HR Tech, Human resource management, Human resources, SaaS, SAP, SAP AG, SuccessFactor, SuccessFactors, Talent Management, Workforce Technologies, yvette cameron ]]> http://nextgeninsights.com/2012/02/22/news-analysis-sap-and-successfactors-unveil-early-roadmap-for-hcm/feed/ 3 nextgeninsights http://nextgeninsights.com/2012/02/09/news-analysis-further-hcm-industry-consolidation-as-oracle-buys-talent-management-vendor-taleo-for-1-9b/ http://nextgeninsights.com/2012/02/09/news-analysis-further-hcm-industry-consolidation-as-oracle-buys-talent-management-vendor-taleo-for-1-9b/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:05:32 +0000 Yvette Cameron @ NextGen Insights, LLC https://nextgeninsights.wordpress.com/?p=665 ]]> Following moves by rivals SAP and Salesforce.com, Oracle expands its offering in Cloud-based HCM with competitive acquisition of leading recruiting and talent management vendor Taleo.

Event: Today Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL), the world’s second largest business applications maker, announced its intentions to acquire Taleo Corporation (NASDAQ: TLEO) for $46.00 per share, or an equivalent of $1.9B. This purchase price represents an 18% premium over prior closing price of $38.94, and values Taleo at almost 5 times its estimated sales for the year. (A sizeable premium, but not as high as SAP’s payment of almost 7.5 times SuccessFactors’ estimated annual sales). The deal is expected to close mid-2012. This latest acquisition brings the total to more than $40B that Oracle has spent across 70+ acquisitions.

Taleo, founded in 1999, is a leading provider of cloud-based talent management solutions to over 5000 enterprises worldwide. Its heritage solution is recruiting software, and today it is a clear leader in the talent acquisition market, managing 15% of all US hires and processing up 74M transactions per day. Over the years Taleo has expanded beyond its heritage to deliver a comprehensive talent management suite including performance and goal management, succession planning, compensation management (with it acquired in 2009 through Worldwide Compensation), and learning and development (also acquired in 2010 from Learn.com).

Analysis: This acquisition is the latest in a string of moves by major players, among the most significant in recent months being SAP’s announcement in December to acquire SuccessFactors for $3.4B and Salesforce.com’s announcement in December to create an HCM Business Unit headed by industry veteran John Wookey. In a market which, according to IDC, is expected to reach $8.1B by 2015, these moves make sense as players look to consolidate market share and capitalize on the shift in deployment preferences from on-premise to cloud-based services. An initial analysis of this transaction reveals:

“Taleo brings complimentary solutions to the Oracle Public Cloud.”

Point of View (POV): Taleo’s strength in recruiting and learning fills a significant gap in the Oracle HCM portfolio, which, despite investments over the years, has been unable to attain a market-leading position. Other areas of the Taleo suite face significant overlap with Oracle’s core and Fusion offerings. Taleo was already in the midst of consolidating its various platforms, and this acquisition only adds to the number of platforms under Oracle’s management. I expect Oracle will continue most planned investments in their on-premise solutions (across Oracle EBS, and Oracle PeopleSoft) while accelerating integration between Fusion and Taleo for a more complete cloud offering.

From a cloud perspective, we have witnessed Larry Ellison move from denouncing cloud computing as “nonsense” in 2010 to investing $1.5B in 2011 to acquire RightNow Technologies (cloud-based CRM solution aimed at combating Oracle rival Salesforce.com) and announcing Oracle’s Public Cloud. With this acquisition of Taleo, Oracle adds new and duplicative cloud-based HCM to its stack, and receives much needed expertise in the area of managing a cloud-based business. The image below demonstrates Oracle’s positioning of this acquisition.

With the acquisition, Oracle has a viable alternative to SaaS-based Workday, enabling it to deliver market-competitive SaaS solutions across the people management spectrum, and hopefully stemming the tide of PeopleSoft HCM customers moving to Workday or other SaaS vendors in lieu of a complex upgrade and Fusion integration.

“The Oracle/Taleo combination delivers powerful intelligence and a complete social experience.”

Point of View (POV): The combination of business intelligence from Taleo’s suite coupled with Oracle’s latest analytics functionality can make for a highly differentiated offering in the market. Additionally, Oracle’s Social Networking (and specifically Fusion Network at Work) capabilities can bring much needed social collaboration into the Taleo suite, filling its most pressing competitive gap across its talent management stack. Taleo’s product roadmap prioritized investments in social technologies at the platform level and in turn at the product level to transform traditional processes into highly collaborative solutions focused on end-users. With this acquisition, I expect these investments will cease or at least take a back seat to the integration of Oracle’s social technologies with the Taleo stack. Oracle’s challenge will be to deliver integration that enables innovation beyond simple connectivity between the two technologies.

“The Oracle/Taleo merger improves the employee experience…simplifies on boarding and quickly aligns employees to company goals, and empowers employees with access to learning and career management tools.”

Point of View (POV): The resulting end-user experience will, for the foreseeable future, be a combination of the Taleo and Oracle capabilities, and as such will depend upon integration. Core data integration (HR data with Taleo’s talent data) is straightforward. What will really improve the employee experience will be a unified user experience (common look & feel, integrated and seamless process flows). Oracle does not have a good history in this area, electing to keep its HCM acquisitions largely silod and relying instead upon emerging Fusion applications to provide that unification layer.

For its part, Taleo comes into the acquisition with its own series of disparate solutions. The Learn.com platform is not yet fully incorporated into the Taleo platform, and other solutions aimed at different recruiting markets continue to run essentially in silos. Clearly, there is a tremendous amount of work ahead for the Oracle/Taleo teams, not only in defining an innovative and market leading roadmap, but also in rationalizing a now broader collection of technologies.

Bottom Line for Customers and Prospects: Proceed with Caution.

According to the press release, “Oracle is currently reviewing the existing Taleo product roadmap and will be providing guidance to customers in accordance with Oracle’s standard product communication policies. Any resulting features and timing of release of such features as determined by Oracle’s review of Taleo’s product roadmap are at the sole discretion of Oracle.” As a result, customers and prospects should consider the following:

• Taleo will continue to operate as an independent vendor until the transaction closes. Current Taleo customers are advised to lock in maintenance and subscription rates as far out as possible, and ensure they are not reliant upon future functionality promises to deliver on business imperatives, as the future pace of innovation on this stack is currently unclear.
• Following the closure of the acquisition, Oracle will be that single “throat to choke” with regard to product, service and integration issues.  Joint Oracle and Taleo customers should apply pressure appropriately to ensure that seamless interoperability is high priority in the future roadmap.
• For current Oracle customers, this acquisition brings market leading recruiting functionality and robust learning capabilities to the Oracle stack, as well as comprehensive SaaS-based talent management suite. Oracle customers, especially those PeopleSoft customers considering upgrading to latest releases of PeopleSoft or implementing Fusion, will soon have a viable alternative to moving to a 3rd party solution. However achieving a fully unified HCM/TM solution in the cloud is likely years away, compared to the pure-play Saas vendors like Workday and Ultimate, which are building this combined functionality natively rather than through acquisition and subsequent integration. Weigh your needs for integration, functionality and a simplified technology stack in light of the new risks and opportunities from this acquisition.

Bottom line for the HCM Market: Talent Management as a category is disappearing

The HCM market is shifting away from a feature/functionality focus to integrated HCM, with the remaining talent management vendors competing for a shrinking opportunity in light of the moving market. While Oracle (like SAP) lost HCM revenues to best of breed talent management suites in previous years, an increasing number of customers are looking back to their core ERP vendors to re-evaluate their options for an integrated suite. Over time, acquiring Taleo will give Oracle the best of both worlds – market leading functionality delivered in an integrated environment, delivered from a single vendor.

We’ve now heard from market leaders SAP and Oracle. Infor (the #3 ERP vendor) made its move last year to acquire Lawson, including its market leading HCM technology. SuccessFactors has announced its move into the HCM marketplace. Workday continues its drum beat of increasing momentum, and others such as Ultimate and ADP continue to add pressure around SaaS HCM. We can expect further consolidation in this space, perhaps from organizations such as IBM or Salesforce.com making additional acquisitions. Who are the likely targets? Certainly the few remaining publicly-traded companies offering cloud-based solutions, such as Saba, Kenexa, Cornerstone OnDemand and Ultimate. Other privately-held vendors are also potential targets, including an emerging breed of players focused on helping organizations “get work done” every day through SaaS-based productivity tools.

Today’s Oracle/Taleo announcement may herald the end of talent management as a separate category of HCM technology, but on its heels may be emerging a new category of vendor, launching again the cycle of innovation, growth and consolidation.

Your POV:

This acquisition has been rumored for some time. Are you surprised by it? Are you a Taleo customer? What is your reaction? Will you embrace Fusion to achieve advanced workforce analytics or social capabilities? Oracle customers: will you move to Taleo’s recruiting solutions, and how might this impact your adoption of Fusion technologies?

Register today for this Thought Leadership Webinar

Sponsored by UpMo and #TChat

Let’s Face it. Employees want to move, change & grow. So why fight it? HR’s main goal is to support the business, but how do organizations do that with challenges ranging from not having enough great talent to fending off the many poachers of the talent you already have in-house? Hear how some companies are combating this issue by embracing new forms of collaboration and transparency and enabling their employees to map their own career growth. The latest trends in Social Talent all tie back to the larger issue, which is supporting the goals and priorities of the company at large.

In this webinar, you will hear from Yvette Cameron, VP and Principal Analyst from Constellation Research, Inc., speak to the trends happening in internal recruitment, retention and mobility processes and how they affect your ability to retain great talent.

Webinar: Social Talent is the Next Wave of Awesomeness!
Date: Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Time: 10:00 AM PST (1:00 p.m. EST)
Register Now: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/235391138

In this webinar you will learn:

• The latest research findings and trends on attracting, engaging and retaining the Millennial Generation
• How emerging Social Talent approaches transform a Command-and-Control culture to Open-and-Engaged – and why you should care
• How the market is evolving to value the corporate lattice over the corporate ladder for internal employee growth and mobility
• How social technologies help employees power up their brand – and the organization’s – for better and faster results

Register Now!

________________________________________________________

About Yvette Cameron: Executive-level leader with over 20 years experience developing, marketing, evangelizing and implementing market leading HCM technology solutions. Deep process and technology expertise spanning social and collaborative talent management, talent acquisition, workforce management, learning management, enterprise social networking and web conferencing. Dedicated to helping HR and business leaders deliver business value through both efficiency and effectiveness of people processes.

About UpMo: UpMo intelligently matches employee competencies and aspirations for career growth with internal job, project and connection opportunities. UpMo’s Social Talent Engine tightens the link between what employees want and what companies need. The result is positive internal mobility that spurs motivation and productivity and keeps more of your essential talent in-house.

About #TChat: Join us for #TChat on Twitter every Wednesday from 7-8 p.m. ET & 6-7 p.m. CT & 5-6p.m. MT & 4-5 p.m. PT. Search for hashtag #TChat on Twitter or your favorite Twitter client and join the conversation. Remember we welcome global input! Join in from  wherever you might be.

“Tuesday’s Tidbits” is a weekly post serving up “choice morsels” of information. Brief? You bet. Distracting? Absolutely. Useful? Hope so! Read on and enjoy.

This week’s Tidbit comes from Mercer.

Infographic by Mercer Insights

Join me Thursday, March 1, at 11am eastern, as I present:“People Insights 2.0: Opportunity at the Confluence of Workforce Intelligence and Social Analytics,” sponsored by HR.com and the Institute of Human Resources (IHR) Community for Social Media and Employee Communication.

Session Description:

The use of enterprise social networking platforms is on the rise as organizations look to these emerging tools to facilitate employee collaboration, knowledge sharing, increased engagement, improved productivity, and even to foster fundamental shifts in culture. As more and more employee interactions take place within these enterprise collaboration tools, new and interesting data emerges about employees, teams, projects, goals, content and other aspects of the enterprise.

This new data, gleaned through analysis of the activities within the collaboration platform, includes insights into how people work and collaborate, the type and quality of content that is contributed and leveraged in the community, the effectiveness of different communications, the degree to which individuals are perceived as leaders or followers, and much more. The emergence of this new data drives much richer insights into the workforce of the organization. It enables social intelligence infusion into traditional talent management processes, such as performance, calibration, succession and retention.

Combining social and workforce analysis enables People Insight 2.0.

In this session, we’ll look how organizations can leverage the opportunities of People Insight 2.0. We’ll cover the tools used and opportunities stemming from the analysis of network connections, community activity, sentiment analysis, employee reputation management, and others. We’ll also explore the ways by which this social data can increasingly be incorporated into workforce analytics and workforce planning platforms for a more holistic view of the workforce.

We’ll review use cases and provide practical tips for how you can immediately apply these new social workforce insights to your talent management initiatives, transforming your people processes for better business results.

Who Should Participate:

All HR Professionals; anyone responsible for internal enterprise social networking and collaboration (such as HRIT/IT leadership); anyone responsible for workforce analytics and/or workforce planning initiatives.

What You Will Learn:

• How and why to augment your current workforce analytics with social data;
• The tools and methodologies that are available to help you capture and understand the data in your social networking platforms;
• Why the static employee profile is insufficient for the way we do business today; and
• How your talent management processes must evolve to incorporate social workforce analysis.

This session is part of a Virtual Conference sponsored by HR.com and the Institute for Human Resources (IHR), the certification arm of HR.com. Register for this event to select the webcasts you’d like to attend, including the one above

(Note: You will be redirected to a login page for HR.com, a free social networking site for HR professionals. If you are not yet a member of HR.com, this link will enable you to register for free membership and then to register for this session.)