Last week, Taleo announced they are building a "performance management suite". After shopping for a performance acquisition over the past year (and coming close to at least one deal) they have finally made the decision to build. My initial thoughts is that Taleo may be arriving a little late to the party. I admire their diligence and think they have made the right decision, but based on their announcement of a first version release in Fall 2007, it will now be over 2 years from intent to market presence of performance management capabilities. Yes…the market is still in its infancy (I estimate it is only 20-25% penetrated), but some vendors are beginning to extent themselves in the market. Example…SuccessFactors currently has a client acquisition rate of 100 new clients quarter-over-quarter and should reach a total of 1,000 customers by the end of the year.
Ironically, in the same week, SuccessFactors has announced the availability of Recruiting Management. Although it is not what I would consider a full-scale ATS (which is not necessarily a bad thing), they have built some solid first version functionality in rather short order (about 6 months). As with compensation and succession planning, SuccessFactors has taken an incremental build approach, centered around performance management, and continue to deliver consistent and on-going functionality on a frequent basis.
More discussion to come…
