Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

Cornerstone OnDemand is a vendor of cloud-based systems for talent management. In February I covered the launch of its Cornerstone for Salesforce application and its announcement of annual earnings. Cornerstone has approximately 1,300 clients and 11 million users in companies with on average 9,000 employees. The company released its financial results for the first quarter of 2013 in May, showing year-over-year revenue growth of 57 percent, to $37.7million. This is an all-time quarterly high for...

In April Workday released version 19 of its suite of applications for human capital management (HCM), financial management and other areas. Workday’s strategy is to differentiate itself in the ERP market, specifically in competing with Oracle and SAP, by being a pure-play cloud vendor. The strategy touts specific value propositions in the system’s cost effectiveness, flexibility, and ease of use and management through its cloud computing and HR to accounting software approach. Much of the job...

I attended the 2013 Ceridian’s analyst day in Chicago to hear about and evaluate the progress the company has made over the last year and see the latest updates to its products since our firm last commented on them. Last September my colleague Mark Smith assessed Ceridian’s workforce management product Dayforce. As well we selected Ceridian’s customer Guitar Center for the 2013 Ventana Research Leadership Award for Overall Business Leadership.

Saba held its annual People 2013 customer and analyst conference recently in San Francisco, with approximately 700 customers in attendance.  At the conference the company provided analysts a perspective on its progress over the last year and its product roadmap.  My colleague Mark Smith wrote about Saba’s acquisition of Human Concepts last year; today Saba says it has 31 million users and 2,100 customers, including names such as Yum Brands, ADP, Proctor & Gamble, Intel and Five Guys Burgers and...

Human capital analytics used to be simple. It focused on compliance reporting, showed basic information and was an afterthought in most applications.  Today analytics is the centerpiece of many human capital management applications and involves many sophisticated tools, because it delivers the some of the greatest value of any process in all HCM.  Our next-generation workforce management benchmark research found that 61 percent of companies surveyed are planning to invest in improving their...

Learning management software (LMS) has evolved over the past 25-plus years from a classroom scheduling tool that helped streamline instructor-led and classroom training to a rich, integrated enterprise application that delivers and tracks training across an entire organization. These applications are effective at enabling organizations to share knowledge and track the knowledge-sharing process. Typically they use a top-down model involving classic instructor-led training and online courseware....

Human capital is most organizations’ largest investment and one of their largest differentiators against the competition. So it follows that those that take advantage of the compelling, game-changing technology now available in human capital management (HCM) will place themselves at a competitive advantage.

Hi; pleased to meet you!  I’m tremendously excited to be joining the team here at Ventana Research, and I’m looking forward to adding my experience, observations and opinions to this team of very talented industry analysts!  Let me start by telling you a little about my background, and then why a chose to come to work here and what I will be covering at Ventana Research.

During its annual industry analyst summit this week, human capital management software vendor SumTotal Systems introduced new heads of finance, marketing and sales, and talked about expanding operations in Europe and Asia-Pacific – all part of a business growth strategy that I am sure the company’s private equity owner is expecting. While I wrote about the company earlier this year, SumTotal now says it has signed up 85 new customers so far in 2012 for its human capital management suite, and...

This week I’m at the 2012 HR Technology Conference (Twitter: #HRTechConf) where the scene is more than cool – it is hip. In the past several years technology for human resources – now more often called human capital management – has transformed from administrative software to applications anyone in the workforce can use to access information about their company, job, goals, performance, pay, benefits and even what they can do to advance in the organization. HR technology is embracing the six...