Excellent analysis, Jason, and I do hope they can pull off the integration while keeping their customer bases happy and tended to, but as you said, in this market it’s gonna be tough. There are too many established and new niche TA and TM players that can nimbly and cost-effectively meet the needs of SMB - a big ol’ swath of available business.

And then there are those still swimming up Workstream. Or not.

As for the marketplace, this will be the year that many TM / TA vendors disappear. The market has too many players that are undercapitalized but with decent revenue, some cash, and stable customer bases. This is too enticing a market for PE’s to ignore in 2010.

IMHO, it was a tremendously poor decision to attempt the migration to J2EE. A massive waste of time and money, without question. From a development perspective, Peopleclick had always been a Microsoft technology house, and had embarked on an initiative to move from traditional VB to .NET. Kim’s decision to totally ignore the company’s knowledge base in MS technology was a foolish attempt for a new officer-level recruit to put his mark on the company.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with J2EE - I’m not advocating that at all. It was just the wrong fit for that organization. Cooler heads prevailed, but not after year of struggle and waste.

From my seat at (below) street level in this business, I have always been impressed with Authoria’s contextual vision for UI and unimpressed with everything about Peopleclick except its AA consulting business.

Kevin sweet comment and I think its pretty clear that Peopleclick customers will be moving into some new technology a la the Vurv story at some point not too far into the future.

I hear year in and year out about overburdened IT people and keeping any more work away from them, but I think in truth its more about avoiding tech-weenies and their great big worlds of “no” than worrying about their workloads.

Running apps in already humming datacenters just aint that much work esp. with good vendor support.

It all reminds me of First Citywide Change Bank: how do you make money ? Simple: Volume.

Excellent post and synopsis. I think any tech merger is a stew and this will be no different but what option did either have? We are now beginning to see more TM vendors than pure play e-recruitment yet the TM market is still very immature and they are all betting on TM being the answer - which I get.

Let’s bookmark this post to 2012 and look back then

Peter

@Peter - I always enjoy looking back at my posts. I wish Bedford luck in blending the 2 companies.

For a real Leno/Conan brawl html5 vs Silverlight makes for more fun. Throw in AdobeAir for comic relief. And that’s just the UI.

I love it when private equity gets involved w my competitors. Great analysis in this post and comments. Tx.