HCM…The New SaaS Darling

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Some notable media outlets and respected bloggers are writing more and more about HCM. Is the HCM space starting to get some respect?

In the past week alone, Reuters published a story about SuccessFactors having one of the largest SaaS deployments to date (with yours truly embedded into the story). Phil Wainewright has some great follow-up on the SaaS deployment story with Authoria weighing in that they actually have larger deployments than SuccessFactors (although I’m not sure I would consider some of Authoria’s large deployments as truly SaaS).

I have also received a number of press calls recently by some of the “hipper” business publications wanting to talk about “talent management”. I guess it helps when Dave Duffield speaks and puts the blogsphere into a mini-frenzy last week when he stated Workday (“on-demand ERP”) will be “at parity” with SAP in 18 months.

As we all know, Salesforce.com has always been the SaaS darling. When people think about SaaS, they think about Salesforce.com and CRM. Its nice to see the mainstream media begin to realize the SaaS play in HCM. Many in the past have argued that ADP could be actually considered the first SaaS vendor. What people don’t realize though is that the eRecruitment/ATS market has been around for over 10 years and is, at least, what I consider one of the original SaaS applications.

  • http://www.donaldhtaylor.co.uk DonaldHTaylor

    Jason, good spot on a media trend, but as to your question Is the HCM space starting to get some respect? I’m afraid the answer is no.

    Googling “Human Capital Management” yields under 1m hits. SaaS +Software almost 8m (the +software takes out the other users of the acronym). In the stories you refer to, SaaS takes the limelight with HCM a supporting player.

    The sexy story right now is SaaS. It’s easy to understand, and – importantly – appeals to the financial pages. HCM isn’t and doesn’t, but that may not be a bad thing. Too many tech bubbles have been driven by faddish mis-understanding (the Learning Management System boom of the early 2000s springs to mind). Your predicted HCM market growth of around 25% is healthy enough without being fuelled by superficial media interest – espcially when plenty of suppliers (InfoBasis included) are growing at well above that rate.

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