Nearly every HCM technology vendor, both public and private, invites both industry and financial analysts to their user conference. User conferences are important for customers and prospects but also a great opportunity for the industry “influencers” to better understand a company’s product roadmap, meeting with the management team, and engage with customers to understand how they are deriving value out of the products. The industry and financial analyst community that covers the HCM space is small and a really great group. I always look forward to running into 5-10 of those peers at any one conference.
I bring this topic up because the Kenexa World Conference is less than a month away and I’m not aware of one analyst, industry or financial, that has been invited. They are the only vendor in the HCM space that essentially ignores the analyst community. I will be in Las Vegas presenting at the HR-XML Conference that same week and actually reached out to a Kenexa executive recently to see if I could stop by their conference. To date, I have received no response. Kenexa has always been private with information they share about the company externally. I, like many others, just wish they would provide more transparency behind their revenues, operations, and strategy.
Ironically, Taleo is having their Taleo WORLD user conference next week and has not only invited most of the key industry and financial analysts but has set up a special Analyst Track specifically for that community.
UPDATE 1: Kenexa is actually having their financial analyst day in December which they just announced last week.
UPDATE 2: I jumped the gun and Kenexa is in progress of setting up industry analyst briefings as we speak.
