During my several years of attending events organized by the cloud computing evangelist salesforce.com, such as Dreamforce and Cloudforce, Xactly Corporation has always had a prominent stand at the expo floor (another fixture at these events has been BigMachines, and not surprisingly the two vendors are close partners). In a nutshell, Xactly’s on-demand software lets sales professionals know, well, exactly what they are getting out of their sales wins.

The company’s flagship software, Xactly Incent, helps sales representatives and other sales professionals determine compensation for sales transactions. Additionally, sales executives can use the company’s analytics software to analyze post-sales information such as what, where, and to whom their product lines have been sold and how profitably.

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My recent in-depth report from the KronosWorks 2011 conference entitled KronosWorks 2011: Beyond Time Clocks for Modern Workforce Management asserted that vertically-oriented tuck-in acquisitions were likely in store for Kronos in 2012. Lo and behold, in mid-January 2012, Kronos announced that it has acquired the assets of OptiLink from The Advisory Board Company in an undisclosed cash transaction.

As a result of the acquisition, Kronos has added one of the industry’s leading acuity-based staffing solutions to its health care workforce management (WFM) suite. Kronos now offers possibly the most advanced clinically-focused WFM suite designed to help healthcare organizations deliver high-quality patient care. More than 3,000 hospitals and 4,000 long-term care organizations use Kronos Workforce Central solutions every day. Other notable competitors in the space are API Healthcare, McKesson, and Lawson Software (part of Infor).

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Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. Part 2 of this series then got under the hood and analyzed Workday’s secret sauce: its object-oriented and in-memory database (IMDB) and definitional services approach, which involves no coding by developers.

The final part of this series will discuss who should be a good fit for Workday and who might not, and why.

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TEC’s 2011 Focus on HCM, Talent, and Recruiting

Over the last several months, I have been working on revamping TEC’s Human Capital Management (HCM) Evaluation Center to ensure that it includes the vast variety of human resources (HR) and related enterprise software solutions available on the market today. My current research initiative is to develop a recruitment and staffing space for our HCM Evaluation Center.

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The 2011 holiday shopping season seems to have arrived a bit sooner for SAP, who forked out US$3.4 billion for SuccessFactors during the first weekend of December 2011 (see SAP’s official press release). Another curiosity of the acquisition is that it took place on Saturday, which hasn’t prevented bloggers and twitterers from swiftly contributing with their off-the-cuff opinions.

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When it comes to finding the right talent, today’s organizations have plenty of options. With the increasing popularity of social networking, however, companies are moving away from traditional hiring processes and opting for more technologically driven methods.

Here are four of the more popular recruiting trends and some of the vendors that offer solutions, apps, or services in each of these spaces.

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Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and notable PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. For a few years now I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about this software company that has purportedly finally overcome the traditional shortcomings of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems of the 1990s.

One of Workday’s earlier marketing slogans said that it was the first new business management solution to come to market “since the Web turned 2.0, Sarbanes met Oxley, and the world became flat.” In fact, Workday is a younger company than Facebook. The vendor says that its biggest distinguishing factor over traditional ERP platforms is its inherent flexibility, most notably its ability to logically reorganize personnel in a global organization on the fly as required.

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In 2005, after his PeopleSoft venture ended (successfully in financial terms, at least), I was sure that Dave Duffield would not sit still for long. And in fact, I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about Workday for a few years now – this company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri.

Dave Duffield is Workday’s co-CEO, co-founder, and chief customer advocate. As mentioned earlier, he was co-founder, CEO, and chairman at PeopleSoft, and Workday is the fifth company that he has founded (see his full bio here). Aneel Bhusri is Workday’s co-CEO and co-founder (he was vice chairman at PeopleSoft). Aneel was named #15 on the 2011 Forbes Midas list (see his full bio here as well as other Workday leadership bios here).

Indeed, David Dobrin, Naomi Bloom, Ray Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, Dennis Howlett, Dana Gardner, Nick Carr, Mike Krigsman, Jason Busch, Phil Wainewright, and Brian Sommer are only a few of the renowned market observers that have been talking, blogging, tweeting, and whatnot about Workday as possibly the best invention since sliced bread. Naturally, the skeptic in me has wondered what all this fuss and adulation was about. For some flavor, here are the blog posts on Workday by Dennis Howlett of ZDNet, Nick Carr of the Rough Type blog, and Vinnie Mirchandani of Deal Architect, and these seasoned and discerning fellas are not easily impressed.

I finally had a deeper look at Workday at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference by salesforce.com (where Workday had a noted presence at the expo floor), and the vendor’s conceptual design and approach is beyond reproach. In many ways, Workday can be viewed as the next generation of good-old PeopleSoft enterprise applications. Like its predecessor, the company started with a set of best-of-breed applications around human capital management (HCM).

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Part 1 of this series introduced Saba Software, a public provider of the Saba People Cloud, which constitutes a new class of business-critical software that combines enterprise learning management, talent management, and social and real-time collaboration technologies. My post first described the vendor’s slew of industry rewards and accolades at the recent 2011 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and related events.

Then, the post discussed the need for the “People Cloud” that transforms people-driven enterprises and analyzed a number of social software use case scenarios. The blog post ended with a description of Saba’s current state of affairs. Part 2 analyzed the individual modules of the Saba People Cloud Applications.

This final part will analyze the underlying product architecture that enables the rich functionality of the Saba People Cloud Applications described in Part 2.

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Part 1 of this series introduced Saba Software, a public provider of what it calls “People Cloud,” which constitutes a new class of business-critical software that combines enterprise learning, talent management, and collaboration technologies. The post first described the vendor’s slew of industry rewards and accolades at the recent 2011 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and related events.

Then, I discussed the need for the “People Cloud” that transforms people-driven enterprises and analyzed a number of social software use case scenarios. My post ended with a description of Saba’s current state of affairs: 700 employees, 1,600 customers, and 23 million users worldwide (its solutions have been deployed in 195 countries in 30 languages). Read the rest of this entry »

The 2011 Enterprise 2.0 conference’s expo floor in Boston in late June featured many of the “usual suspects,” such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Adobe, SuccessFactors, Jive Software, SocialText, OpenText, Yammer, and Cisco Systems, to name only a few well-established providers (in addition to the plethora of innovative startup companies that one could encounter there). There were also some notable absentees, such as SAP (StreamWork), salesforce.com (Chatter), and Atlassian (Jira).

But my attention was drawn to one vendor that has not been discussed as much as it deserves: Saba Software.

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Part 1 of this blog series introduced Reflexis Systems, whose task execution solutions have helped over 110 retailers and their suppliers worldwide execute their strategies and increase profits. The article analyzed Reflexis’ genesis and evolution from a task management specialist to an integrated retail workforce management (WFM) platform provider.

Reflexis’ Retail Execution Management platform features labor budgeting/forecasting/scheduling, time and attendance (T&A), task management, and key performance indicator (KPI)/compliance solutions to enable retailers to align their store labor/activities to corporate goals and institutionalize best-practice responses to real-time metrics. As mentioned in Part 1, Reflexis’ customers, many of which are Top 250 global retailers, have reported improvements in store-level compliance with corporate strategies; higher productivity of merchandising, field, and store management; and increased sales and profitability. Read the rest of this entry »

My recent post (Software and Human) Help Wanted in Overwhelmed Retail Stores talked about how much attention (and IT investment) retailers pay to their merchandize planning and supply chain optimization processes as compared to their store-level task execution, even though this is where “the rubber meets the road.” I concluded my post with the fact that there are dozens of retail workforce management (WFM) vendors and solutions, but not many have the required store-level task management capabilities.

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Over the past few months, analysts at Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) have been working on a new research space for talent management. I’m happy to announce that the Talent Management research space for talent management systems is now online and available to the public.

Talent Management: What’s In It?

TEC’s new Talent Management research space is geared toward end users looking for solutions to manage their business workforce—their most valuable asset! This research space for talent management systems includes vendor-related information such as white papers, case studies, articles, and reports, and contains a talent management model that you can use as a request for information (RFI).

This RFI can help you determine the talent management activities that you perform within your organization, and how important specific functionalities are to your selection of talent management software. The Talent Management model addresses the following software functionality:

• Recruitment and Staffing
• Personnel Management
• Career Development & Succession Planning
• Learning Management
• Performance & Compensation Management
• Workforce Planning
• Product Technology

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My recent series on Quantum Retail presented the many difficult merchandise range and assortment planning issues that retailers face, and the ensuing tough decisions that they have to continually make in that regard. But a lesser-known fact is that even though retailers spend multiple billions of dollars on planning activities and supporting tools to bring customers to their stores, they only execute at about 60 percent efficiency in their stores at best, thus leaving trillions of dollars in merchandise at risk. Read the rest of this entry »