HR Technology

HR News & Trends, HR Technology

Talent Software Vendor iCIMS Gets New Partner, $35 Million Investment

by on Jan 11, 2012, 2:15 PM  |  No comments yet
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HR talent software vendor iCIMS has a new business partner and $35 million to spend on expansion. The company announced this morning that private equity fund Susquehanna Growth Equity has taken a minority stake in the firm.

“The company,” says today’s announcement, “plans to significantly increase investments in marketing, product development, and additional acquisitions that will further accelerate the organization’s rapid growth and expansion plans.”

Founded in 1999 by its CEO Colin Day, iCIMS offers SaaS-based talent acquisition, onboarding, performance and talent management tools. The company has made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies for six consecutive years, finishing 2010 with revenue of $25.6 million (2011 rankings won’t be released until later this year). Read more…

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HR Technology

Thinking About the Cloud and Saas? Here’s What You Need to Know

by on Jan 2, 2012, 12:35 PM  |  2 Comments
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Thinking of heading to the cloud in 2012? Everyone seems to be, including some of the biggest HR vendors in the world.

Just a few weeks ago, when SAP snapped up SuccessFactors, the buzz was all about the cloud. A similar buzz ensued when Oracle bought RightNow Technologies.

Even though Wall Street reacted to the SAP/SuccessFactors deal as if the cloud had just been discovered, the reality is cloud computing has been around almost as long as the Internet itself. What the excitement is about is how HR software services are delivered, and the big deal is that increasingly, companies aren’t buying systems, they’re licensing seats.

For HR, that means SaaS. SaaS, the acronym for software-as-a-service, is the type of cloud computing with which HR professionals are most familiar. Yet, like the cloud itself, SaaS has about as many different flavors as there are vendors offering it. Read more…

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HR Technology

Behind the Big SAP-SuccessFactors Deal: 3 Trends and 3 Critical Questions

by on Dec 7, 2011, 10:57 AM  |  2 Comments
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This past weekend, the talent management systems market reached an inflection point.

SAP acquired SuccessFactors, a leading provider of cloud-based recruiting, performance, learning and workforce planning solutions. Although market consolidation has become the standard in talent management technology, this acquisition permanently changes the landscape for both end users and solution providers.

At a price of $3.4 billion and $40 a share, this acquisition may be considered a risky investment. Yet, SuccessFactors’ 15 million users will undoubtedly bring SAP tremendous growth (including former customers such as Siemens) especially during a time when the demand for SaaS ERPs is skyrocketing. The next leader in HR technology has clearly been established and the rest of the market needs to respond in a big way. Read more…

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HR News & Trends, HR Technology

Just Acquired SuccessFactors Acquires Recruitment Marketer Jobs2Web

by on Dec 6, 2011, 2:34 PM  |  No comments yet
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Just three days after the news that SAP is acquiring SuccessFactors comes the announcement that SuccessFactors is now buying recruitment marketer Jobs2Web for $110 million.

SuccessFactors says it will combine its “social, mobile and collaborative recruiting management solution with Jobs2web’s leading recruiting marketing platform, creating an end-to-end recruiting system.”

Saturday’s SAP-SuccessFactors acquisition touched off a rally Monday among the publicly traded HR tech vendors, as well as speculation about further consolidation in the industry. Read more…

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HR News & Trends, HR Technology

Will SAP-SuccessFactors Deal Be the Start of a Business Software War?

by on Dec 6, 2011, 9:42 AM  |  2 Comments
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There’s nothing like a big-buzz acquisition to lift the boats in the HR SaaS harbor. Taleo, Kenexa, and even pricey Salesforce saw jumps in their stock as investors reacted to the weekend news that ERP vendor SAP was buying SuccessFactors.

Taleo and Kenexa were both up by double-digits. Salesforce, trading well over $100, was up 4.5 percent. SuccessFactors, as to be expected, was the big winner, catapulting nearly 52 percent to close just below the $40-a-share SAP will pay.

The rally was to be expected, given the speculation about who might next be an acquisition target in the talent management/HR software sector. It was mere minutes after the conference call SAP held Saturday morning to discuss the sale that analysts began speculating about which company would be next to get bought up by whom.

Except for a bizarre TechCrunch post characterizing the deal as a yawner, the rest of the business press, and especially the HR analysts, saw the deal as both a validation of the cloud computing model and the likely start of an M&A war among the biggest names in business software. Read more…

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HR News & Trends, HR Technology

SAP Will Spend $3.4 Billion to Buy Cloud Provider SuccessFactors

by on Dec 3, 2011, 3:17 PM  |  No comments yet
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Germany-based software maker SAP announced today (Dec. 3) that it is buying SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. The $40 a share all-cash deal is a 52 percent premium over SuccessFactors’ $26.25 closing price Friday.

The unusual Saturday announcement made much of the part the acquisition will play in “accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure.”

During a conference call Saturday with financial and industry analysts, SAP’s Co-CEO Bill McDermott, enthusiastically declared that the acquisition of SuccessFactors will “create, yes, create a cloud powerhouse… This market, ladies and gentlemen, is just beginning.”

Reinforcing the point, SAP said SuccessFactors’ founder and CEO Lars Dalgaard will not only continue to run the company, which will remain independent, but he will also lead SAP’s cloud business. Read more…

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HR Insights, HR Technology

How Technological Change Pushes Boundaries in the Workplace

by on Nov 15, 2011, 10:57 AM  |  1 comment
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By Laurie Bassi, Ed Frauenheim, and Dan McMurrer with Larry Costello

On February 12, 2008, a marketing manager at Yahoo lost his job.

That shouldn’t have been a big deal given the troubles of the Internet firm and the regularity of layoffs in the U.S. economy during the past three decades. But this particular pink slip caught the public’s eye.

The employee, Ryan Kuder, “twittered” his layoff. That is, Kuder used his micro-blogging account at Internet site Twitter to give a blow-by-blow account of getting the axe. Among his “tweets”: Read more…

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HR News & Trends, HR Technology

Google+ Joins Facebook and LinkedIn, Launches Business Pages

by on Nov 8, 2011, 7:35 AM  |  No comments yet
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Google+ went “Pages” this week, opening up its social network to brands and businesses, and others, the way Facebook and LinkedIn have. But one-upping those two social networks, Google+ enables businesses to meet their fans, friends, connections or, in the case of recruiters, prospects face-to-face via the multi-user video feature, Hangouts.

As a blog post announcing the new business pages says, “Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face.”

Google is wasting no time promoting Pages. The search giant has added Pages to its search results page and is committing the + sign to simplify getting to a particular Google+ Pages site. A few businesses already have Pages up. Macy’s, for example. Get there by clicking the link or try out the + search by putting it in front of Macy’s in the Google search window. Read more…

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HR Technology

When Consumerization & Gamification Take Over HR Technology

by on Oct 25, 2011, 11:05 AM  |  1 comment
Gamification

I love the fact that enterprise software is becoming more like consumer software every day — more usable, more accessible, more obvious and discoverable functionality, more mobile/social/global, and with much more of the look and feel of the consumer Web sites I’ve come to know and love.

And for all of us who love contests with prizes or just getting a visible expression of what we’ve accomplished, gamification has added important new capabilities to the quest for ever more useful and business outcomes-driving enterprise software. So far, so good.

But of late I’ve discovered an entirely new trend in the design of enterprise software that isn’t so good. I’ve called it mechugasification, from the Yiddish meshugas, of which there are many Anglicized spellings but which is universally understood to mean madness, insanity, or craze. Read more…

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HR Management, HR Technology

High Performance HR? It’s All About Technology AND Social Media

by on Oct 24, 2011, 7:45 AM  |  3 Comments
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“I only have 90 connections, I know but I was only connected to LinkedIn about a year ago.”

“Yes, I did look her up on LinkedIn and I thought “ ‘how you could be the head of HR and only have 32 connections?’ ”

These statements came from people I spoke with last week concerning the use of LinkedIn.

It seems that a lot of folks (professionals) have been asleep at the switch. The use of social media has transformed the landscape. I know of people that are dissatisfied with their career but they spend all their free time on Facebook instead of Linkedin. These same folks basically set up a page at one time on LinkedIn but never really went back to it. Read more…

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