This week SuccessFactors and SAP announced their integration plans. Simply stated, the combined companies plan to move all their strategic talent management investments from SAP HCM and Business ByDesign into SuccessFactors, and build Employee Central (SuccessFactors' central directory product) into its core cloud-based HRMS offering. This is a bold and somewhat risky strategy. Let me explain just a few of the challenges (and opportunities): First, the Employee Central strategy will likely take years to execute. SAP HCM is a highly integrated set of talent management systems which have been in development for 25+ years.
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The talent management systems market has been under quite a bit of stress lately.   In the last 90 days we have seen SAP's acquisition of SuccessFactors, followed by Oracle's acquisition of Taleo, and then the smaller Kenexa acquisition of Outstart and PeopleFluent acquisition of Strategia.   And while all this is going on, CornerstoneOnDemand announced a strong end to 2011 (revenues up to $75. 5 Million up 62%), SumTotal announced 90% revenue growth, Saba's stock is up 21% this month, and LinkedIn announced that its revenues in the recruiting market have now eclipsed that of Taleo (136% YTY growth). What's going on? We are seeing three big trends play out here.
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Last week LinkedIn reported amazing financials (stock jumped almost 20% in one day). The company reported 105% YTY growth in quarterly revenues to $167. 7 Million, putting the company on a 2012 plan of $860 Million. But the real story is the huge jump in revenues from LinkedIn's recruiting services ("Hiring Solutions"). Revenues in this segment grew by 136% to $84.
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I guess we saw this coming. Today Oracle announced plans to acquire Taleo, the largest provider of recruitment software, for $1. 9 billion. The company positions this as part of Oracle's strategy to build a "comprehensive, cloud offering to help companies manage their HR operations and employee careers. " This is a very smart move, and one which most analysts predicted.
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Back in 2006 we had a dream of building a new type of industry recognition program that would use the rigor of our research to recognize leading L&D, HR, and talent management programs around the world. This program, which we call theBersin & Associates Learning Leaders®, is now in its sixth year and today I am very excited to announce the winners and highlight the 108 page best-practice report highlighting these fantastic programs. About the Learning Leaders Program There are many recognition programs in the industry. Some are very promotional (e. g.
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This week Kenexa, one of the largest and most successful HR and talent acquisition consulting companies, announced the acquisition of Outstart, a pioneering company in the market for e-learning tools, learning management, collaboration, and mobile learning solutions. This represents a major move for Kenexa, putting the company firmly into the market for training tools, systems, and solutions.  (Research members, watch for a detailed bulletin on this acquisition coming later this week. ) Background: Kenexa is a publicly traded consulting and software company which focuses on six major business areas:  recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and employment branding, assessment (Kenexa is one of the world leaders in assessment science and tools), employee engagement (validated engagement surveys, tools, and consulting), strategic HR consulting (HR strategy and talent segmentation), leadership development (the company recently acquired a leadership development company and now sells leadership programs and content development), and talent management software and services. Over the years, Kenexa has grown both organically and through acquisition.
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The LMS market remains very hot, and so does Facebook (below). Comments on both. This week Peoplefluent (a $100M+ talent management software company, built from the combination of Authoria and Peopleclick) announced the acquisition of Strategia, a small but very successful enterprise learning management systems company. Strategia was a Canadian enterprise LMS company with large clients like Bombardier. What this acquisition shows is two trends in the market.
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