Its really a good time to be in HR Technology

There is a growing importance of talent & organizations have been asking really important questions.
Who are my critical employees? What have been their career moves? What are their critical strengths/weakness and how do I develop them etc.
Unfortunately traditional ERP vendors have never had strong talent management functionalities, they were strong on the Core HR areas, which dont answer the critical questions that companies are now asking.
The last few years have been very interesting in the field of HR technology. There is a growing interest of traditional vendors like SAP, Oracle & new vendors like Workday to enhance their offerings in the area of HR Technology to include stronger talent management functionalities.


These disruptive vendors, as I would call them, have done the following really smart things

1. SaaS based cloud offering - Having a SaaS model enables them to give seamless upgrades. This ensures that all customers are always on the latest software release. Imagine, a on-premise upgrade would take anywhere between 3-6 months.
2. Strong functionality - Bringing in industry best practices onto the software continuously
3. Pay per use model - this brings in transparency in pricing for the HR systems
4. Slick user interface - Most of the functionality is mobile enabled & the interface is intuitive to the end users. Imagine a facebook like interface for a HR system, sounds interesting right. Many modules are also mobile enabled so that employees can interact with their data on the move.
5. Social media - With the rise of social media tools like twitter etc it was only time that these also entered the HR space. Now vendors are bundling social tools along with the HR systems.
6. Strong customer relations - traditional vendors rarely if ever listened to their customers for feedback. These vendors spend lot of time and effort in understanding customer feedback & incorporating their needs into their software due to their SaaS based model.

Traditional vendors i.e. Oracle, SAP who used to offer standard HR products realized that more nimble vendors like SuccessFactors, Taleo, Workday have stolen a march over them in this space. Hence to augment their HR offerings they have chosen to acquire these companies. e.g. Taleo- Oracle, SAP-SuccessFactors etc.

The coming few years will be interesting as many of the functionalities would get expanded to include other areas of HR like Time/Attendance, Payroll etc.
Maybe then the important questions that companies are asking would be even easier to answer.