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Event Report: Customers Very Happy At Ultimate Connections 2013 (#ulticonnect)

Published on March 29, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Partnership Announcements Enhance Ultimate Software’s Offerings

Amidst a crowd of 1500 customers, partners, and attendees, Ultimate Software held their annual gathering from March 12th to March 15th, 2013 in Las Vegas. Geared towards the medium sized to enterprise markets, Ultimate Software has steadily taken market share from ADP for payroll and expanded out into operational and strategic human capital management (HCM) capabilities. New mobile access, generation 4 cloud architecture, and timeline features for employee’s highlight Ultimate’s growing ambitions and customer requirements.

At the event, Ultimate announced two strategic partnerships that bode well for customers and prospects facing an increasing level of customer complexity and growing need for global capabilities:

Celergo partnership adds global payroll capabilities to internationalization efforts. Celergo’s founder and CEO, Michele Honomichl, and Adam Rogers announced on stage global payroll services support for 110 countries and the ability to process payroll in over 150 countries. In addition, Ultimate’s Spring and Fall 2013 release of the flagship UltiPro includes support for 28 country specific localizations such as Australia, Brazil, China, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, and Thailand. Other key features include, global compensation management, localized compliance for data and employee privacy rules, and additional language translations.

Point of View (POV): Ultimate’s customers operate in 144 countries. As organizations follow the growth overseas, the global payroll connector and Celergo partnership gives mid market and enterprise customers a competitive option as they expand their presence abroad and usage of UltiPro. These proactive steps to address global capabilities now, provide a key differentiation among potential competitors and places Ultimate Software in a potential position of international expansion.

Informatica partnership paves the way for future cloud partnerships. At the conference, Informatica announced a self-service solution for HCM data connections. Built on top of UltiPro Carrier Network (UCN), customers have access to over 100 packaged connectors to benefits carriers and third party solutions.

(POV): Customers and prospects do not want to worry about integration of their employee records or people management solutions with medical, dental, vision, and other benefits providers. In the long term, customers seek worry free integration platforms to third party applications, cloud ecosystems, and mobile ecosystems. The partnership with Informatica solves the needs of complex integration scenarios and Ultimate customers do not pay for the integration tool. However, customers who are looking for a lower cost integration solution for non-UCN endpoints may want to consider more cost-effective offerings for more point to point integration scenarios.

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Monday’s Musings: Trends In The Top Software Insider Posts of 2012 (#softwareinsider)

Published on January 3, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Thank You For Your Support

SoftwareInsider.org generated almost 10 million page views in 2012 (see Figure 1). This does not include syndication through Constellation Research, Forbes (discontinued in 2012), Enterprise Irregulars, Computerworld UK, and other great media partners.

Figure 1. Software Insider Achieved 9.8M Page Views for 2012

Classic Posts Address The Key Fundamentals In The Disruptive Technology Shift

Four posts have made the all time favorite list and address the 5 consumer technology forces that influence enterprise software.

2012 Top 40 Reflects A Broader Shift To Business Outcomes And Technology Adoption

Analyst Relations and the World of Influence - The top blog post of 2013 discussed the future of the industry analyst versus legacy analyst firms.

1. Event Report: IIAR UK Forum – The Future of the Industry Analyst (Legacy vs Disruptive)

Consumerization of Technology and The New C-Suite – The impact of technology on the C-suite has never been greater. As business strategy relies more on technology, CMOs, CFOs, and other line of business heads can expect to work more closely with the CIOs and CTOs.

7. Trends: The Battle For CMO Mind Share

13. Monday’s Musings: Why Are Innovative CIOs Betting Less On Cloud And Virtualization?

21. Monday’s Musings: Understand the Four Personas Of Disruptive Tech Adoption

22. Quark Summary: What CFO’s Need To Know About SaaS And Cloud Integration

25.Quark Summary: What Every CMO Needs To Know About The Five C’s of Customer Engagement

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Monday’s Musings: Understand The Four Organizational Personas Of Disruptive Tech Adoption

Published on December 2, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Pace of Innovation Exceeds Ability To Consume

Rapid innovation, flexible deployment options, and easy consumption models create favorable conditions for the proliferation of disruptive technology. In fact, convergence in the five pillars of enterprise disruption (i.e. social, mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications), has led to new innovations and opportunities to apply disruptive technologies to new business models. New business models abound at the intersection of cloud and big data, social and mobile, social and unified communications, and cloud and mobile.

Unfortunately, most organizations are awash with discovering, evaluating, and consuming disruptive technologies. Despite IT budgets going down from 3 to 5% year over year, technology spending is up 18 to 20%. Why? Amidst constrained budgets, resources, and time limits, executives are willing to invest in disruptive technology to improve business outcomes. Consequently, successful adoption is the key challenge in consuming this torrent of innovation. This rapid pace of change and inability to consume innovation detract organizations from the realization of business value.

Organizations Fall Into Four Personas Of Disruptive Technology Adoption

A common truism in the industry is “Culture trumps technology”. As organizations apply methodologies such as Constellation’s DEEPR Framework in improving adoption, leaders must first determine which of the four personas best fits their organization’s appetite for consuming and innovating with disruptive technologies.

The personas of disruptive technology adoption assess organizational culture in two key axes (see Figure 1). The first is how incremental or transformational an organization looks at applying disruptive technology to business models. The second assesses how proactive or reactive an organization is in carrying out new initiatives. Based on these dimensions, the four personas include:

Market leaders. Market leaders prefer to drive transformational innovation. They look at technologies as enablers in disrupting business models. They see competitive differentiation in delivering outcomes to customers. Market leaders accept failure as part of the innovation process. They fail fast and move on.
Fast followers. Fast followers prefer to react to the success of market leaders and their experiments. When they sense success, they tend to jump in. Fast followers do not like to fail and rapidly apply lessons learned from market leaders into their road maps. Fast followers tend to deliver scale in the markets as a counter balance to arriving later in the market.
Cautious adopters. Cautious adopters proactively deliver incremental innovation. They tend to take a more measured approach and spend more time studying how they can improve an existing success than creating a transformational change. Cautious adopters often come from regulated industries where security and safety are paramount objectives.
Laggards. Laggards tend to procrastinate on applying innovations to their business models. They prefer not be bothered by trends and will only react when the trends have moved beyond mainstream. They see value in waiting as prices will drop over time as success rates increase over time. Laggards enjoy waiting.

During the interviews and discussions with the 2012 Constellation SuperNova award participants, key questions emerged in the decision process on whether to adopt or pass on a disruptive technologies. These questions aligned well with the four personas of disruptive technology adoption.

Figure 1. Organizations Should Understand Which Persona Of Disruptive Tech Adoption Describes Them Best

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Event Report: Preview 2 – The Exclusive Market Maker 1:1 Keynote Interviews At Constellation’s Connected Enterprise 2012 (#CCE2012)

Published on October 15, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Think TED Meets Enterprise For The C-Suite – Constellation’s Connected Enterprise.

Constellation’s flagship event, Connected Enterprise 2012, starts November 9th to 11th, 2012. This intimate innovation summit in Dana Point, CA (www.stregismb.com) is designed for senior business leaders who are attempting or successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models.

Over 200 participants will enjoy this experiential 3-day, 2-night executive retreat that includes mind expanding keynotes from visionaries and futurists, interactive best practices panels, deep 1:1 20 minute interviews w/ market makers, rapid fire high energy new technology demos, The Constellation SuperNova Awards event, a golf outing, and an experiential companion program.

Join Us For Exclusive Market Maker 1:1 Keynote Interviews From The Industry’s Most Sought After Visionaires

Our theme for 2012 and 2013 centers on the “Art of the Possible”. As part of the programming, we have 4 exclusive keynote 1:1′s with market makers from Box, Microsoft, SAP, and Yammer. I will have the privilege and honor of interviewing these market makers in a fast-paced but deep 20 minute format covering a wide range of issues including future vision, perspectives on enterprise innovation, and personal anecdotes. These exclusive Market Maker 1:1 Keynote Interviews will be live streamed. Here are the 2012 distinguished Market Maker 1:1 Keynotes:

Mike Ehrenberg, Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Software Architect for Microsoft Dynamics (November 9th at 4:15 pm PST)

Mike Ehrenberg is a Microsoft Technical Fellow, and chief technology officer (CTO) for Microsoft Business Solutions. He leads the work on long-term product strategy and on driving relationships between Microsoft Dynamics and the technology teams across Microsoft.

Ehrenberg joined Microsoft in 2003, after 25 years of business application development across banking and brokerage transaction systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) for process manufacturing, and supplier relationship management (SRM) solutions. At Olivetti, he led the development of one of the first commercial banking systems for Windows. As CTO at Marcam, Ehrenberg drove the development of the first ERP product for Windows NT, deeply architected for the Microsoft platform. At Frictionless Commerce, he led development of one of the first complete SRM solutions deployable by design either on-premises or in the cloud.

Ehrenberg, his family and golden retriever Lucy live in Seattle and love spending time cycling, skiing, watching and playing soccer and cheering on the Boston Red Sox.

Dr. Vishal Sikka, Chief Technology Officer, SAP AG (November 10th at 9:25 am PST)

Dr. Vishal Sikka is member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and the Global Managing Board, heading technology and innovation for the company. Sikka has responsibility for technology and platform products, including database and technology especially the industry break-through in-memory database – SAP HANA, as well as analytics, mobile, application platform and middleware. He drives emerging technologies and advanced development for the SAP next-generation technology platform, applications and tools. He also oversees key technology partnerships, customer co-innovation, and incubation of emerging businesses. He has global responsibility for the SAP Research organization, academic and government relations.

In addition, Sikka has been chief technology officer (CTO) of SAP since 2007, responsible for the overall technology, architecture and product standards across the entire SAP product portfolio. Sikka is the author of “Timeless Software,” which underpins the SAP architecture and innovation strategy.

Sikka holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University in California, and his experience includes research in artificial intelligence, programming models and automatic programming, and information management and integration – at Stanford, at Xerox Palo Alto Labs, and as founder of two startup companies.

Adam Pisoni, Co-Founder, CTO, and Board Member of Yammer, Inc. (November 10th a 10:40 to 11:00 am PST)

Adam oversees engineering and software development at Yammer as Chief Technology Officer. He is considered a pioneer of the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) category and a visionary in organizational design and transformation. Adam has played a pivotal role in
shaping Yammer’s iterative and data-driven design approach to product development, which is optimized for rapid innovation, usability and end user adoption. His leadership has helped Yammer achieve remarkable growth and global recognition for its rapidly-evolving
cloud service.

Adam has dedicated his career to building Internet companies. Prior to Yammer, he worked at Geni – a genealogy website, where the idea for Yammer was originally conceived. Before Geni, Adam worked at Shopzilla, and helped lead the company to its eventual sale to Scripps Networks.
Adam also co-founded and served as CTO of CNation, a web development consultancy with clients such as CBS MarketWatch, BizRate.com, Fox Interactive, Nissan of Japan and Honda. Cnation’s work for Honda earned them the 1997 Clio award for interactive design.

Aaron Levie, Co Founder and CEO

Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box, which he originally created as a college business project with the goal of helping people easily access their information from any location. Box was launched from Aaron’s dorm room in 2005 with the help of CFO Dylan Smith. He is the visionary behind Box’s product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating the best of traditional content management with the most effective elements of social business software. He has spoken about content and collaboration tools at events such as Fortune Brainstorm Tech, Web 2.0, Dreamforce, Accenture Global Summit, South by Southwest, and Svase.

Aaron studied business at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California before taking a leave of absence.

Come Join Us At CCE2012

Register for the event

Check out the full schedule:

Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Copyright © 2001 – 2012 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
Contact the Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Customer Experience!

Event Report: Dreamforce X (#DF12) Emerges As The South By Southwest (#SXSW) For The Enterprise

Published on September 23, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Dreamforce Represents The Mecca For The “Art Of The Possible” In The Enterprise

Whether Salesforce.com’s flagship conference at Moscone Center was the most attended conference (~48,000) or the most registered for event (~90,000), matters not. When examined in context of the magnitude of what was accomplished, the impact of this 10th annual event transcends attendance numbers. Business folks and the converted IT brethren converged on the week of September 18th, 2012, to see what the future could be inside the enterprise. They left with inspiration and the gospel of what was possible, as told by those before them. The event represented the intersection of where aspiration meets innovation for the enterprise.

Key takeaways from interviews with over 100 attendees reflect the following trends:

Attendee sentiment signals the return of the front office. Prior to the coining of the CRM term, front office was the term which defined marketing, service, eCommerce, and sales force automation. The move back to integrated customer experiences reflects a renewed interest in all the front office touch points and all the support in the back office required to support the customer experience. Attendees walked in with questions about how to integrate their legacy ERP and expose their transactional systems into the front office.
Customers seek knowledge and case studies on business transformation. Delegations arrived to see how they could change their business. Most came with both business and IT to learn from the best practices of others. Almost every customer case study session was packed and common questions revolved around, “How did you do that?”
Product announcements and pre-announcements bring the enterprise closer to the consumer experience. Pre-announcement of Salesforce Identity for Winter 2013 will provide users with Facebook-like single sign on and identity management services. The availability of the Touch Platform services will provide a write once, deploy anywhere touch based mobile UI Experience. The pre-announcement of the Force.com Canvas provides a UI layer to run any other application within the Salesforce.com environment. The App Exchange Checkout delivers out of the box billing for developers and improves the users app store experience. Geolocation capabilities in the pilot of database.com in the Winter 2013 release will improve mobile experiences. Chatter communities pilot in Fall of 2012 and pre-announcement addresses the issue of multiple group management.
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Monday’s Musings: The New Engagement Platform Drives The Shift From Transactions

Published on August 27, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Convergence In The Five Forces Of Consumerization Of Technology Drives The Next Big Thing

Social has given us the tools to connect. Mobile has given us the ability to interact any time and anywhere. Cloud delivers access points to us with a rich array of content and information. Big data provides us with the context and information to make decisions. Unified communications and video transform how we share ideas. This convergence of the five forces of consumerization drives the next shifts in technology. The move from transaction to engagement and from engagement to experience is happening now. The era of transactional apps rapidly makes way for the era of engagement.

If Business Value And Outcomes Are The Goal, Then We Need An Engagement Platform For The Enterprise

The arrival of engagement platforms does not signify time to throw out the transactional systems. In fact, those systems provide the foundation required for engagement. The engagement layer exposes transactions and allow for deeper interaction and richer sources of information. However, the transactional systems lack the ability to support engagement.

In fact, organizations around the world struggle with building the right engagement strategy for their customers and employees. While crafting the right strategy should be designed prior to any technology selection, once completed, the technology to support the strategy does not exist out of the box from ANY solution provider. Unfortunately, the technologies to achieve engagement remain disparate and hodge podge. Many solution providers seek to achieve the engagement layer from different heritages:

Figure 1. Technologies Will Evolve From Transactions to P2P

The Engagement Platform Requires Nine Main Technology Components

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Market Maker 1:1: #HRTechConf Preview w/ Bill Kutik

Published on August 7, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

15 Years of HR Technology At The Industry’s Premier Event

The fifteenth annual HR Technology Conference and Exposition returns to McCormick Place in Chicago October 8th to 10th, 2012. HR Tech is the industry’s longest running event looking at technologies that influence the Future of Work.

The Inside View With Bill Kutik – Future of Work Pioneer And Co-Chairman of HR Tech

Since 1990, Bill Kutik has been a Technology Columnist for Human Resource Executive® (and for HREOnline™ since 2006,), also serving as co-chairman of the magazine’s famous annual conference, HR Technology® Conference & Exhibition, since it began in 1998. In 2008, he started The Bill Kutik Radio Show®, a bi-weekly online talk show with industry leaders.

HR World named him one of “The Top 25 HR Influencers of 2007.” More recently, he was named a “Top 25 HR Digital Influencer 2009″ and a “Top 100 Influencer.”

For 20 years, he was consulting editor for Esther Dyson’s leading computer industry newsletter, Release 1.0. Previously he was the founding editor of the monthly magazine, Computers in HR Management; managing editor of Ziff-Davis’ Computer Industry Daily; and a reporter for The New York Times and The New York Daily News. He has also published articles in Newsweek, Washington Post, Institutional Investor, New York Magazine, Business Month, IHRIM Journal, Cruising World and Backpacker (where he was the founding editor).

We sat down with industry pioneer Bill Kutik for a preview of this year’s event:

1. Where do you see the new trends in HR tech going? What’s changed since last year? (Have we moved beyond Cloud, is everything social?)

Bill Kutik (BK): This year marks an inflection point in HR technology – perhaps in all of IT – the end of one era and the beginning of another, a generational shift in computing.

It happens every 10 – 15 years and remarkably HR has often been at the leading edge of change, either because corporations thought it didn’t matter if IT experiments failed there or because it’s the only department that touches every employee in the company.

Remember, PeopleSoft released the first packaged client/server application (for HR but the first for any function) in 1989, which started the death of the mainframe. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s claims aside, HR has been using hosted applications (perhaps not anyone’s version of true SaaS) for recruiting since 1998 and major web-based applications since 2000.

Now the combination of SaaS (Cloud Computing) plus Social in the Enterprise – companies using private collaborative software to get real work done – are marking a new era in computing.

These will be among the major topics this year at the HR Technology® Conference in Chicago, October 8-10.

2. Why the continued interest and investment by organizations in HR and related technologies?

BK: The main reason is the 50-year-long lie in large type in corporate annual reports is finally seen as true: “People are our most important asset.” People costs, even in manufacturing firms with huge capital investments, are more than 50 percent of the annual run-rate. Obviously closer to 90 percent in knowledge-based firms like consulting, law, accounting and software.

To succeed in 2012, organizations must have an effective people strategy aligned with their goals. They must identify the best players, assign them to the right work and keep them engaged. Technology doesn’t create this strategy – executives do – but they can’t properly execute their strategy without the right technology to enable it.

HR technology isn’t for HR anymore. The latest applications reaching mass adoption – such as the Talent Management suite – are now used almost exclusively by line managers and employees after HR has purchased the software and configured it properly.

3. Are 2012 HR technology budgets increasing compared to prior years?

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Tuesday’s Tip: Why Context Matters – Forget Real-Time, Achieve Right-Time

Published on July 24, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

The Real-Time Hype Is Filled With Flaws

The hype around big data, social media, and mobility has many folks imagining the real-time enterprise in the future of work, next generation customer experiences, matrix commerce, or the data to decisions journey. While real-time theoretically leads to quicker information and faster response times, the reality requires closer examination for three reasons:

Customers and employees only want engagement aligned with self interest. Relevancy of information is required for customers and employees to respond. Real-time interactions quickly evolve into noise. Signal to noise ratios must be improved as garbage in will lead to massive garbage out. In some cases, customers don’t want engagement. They just want the experience.
No human can truly handle the volume and flow of real-time interactions. The proliferation of channels and data sources creates a data deluge. Filtering is required in order to handle real-time. Workers already inundated with email, sms, and chats, really just want to get work done, they don’t want to be bogged down with more interactions.
Real time is not fast enough. Real-time is reactive not proactive. Anticipation and prediction emerge as key requirements. Reaction does not lead to a better customer experience or employee interaction. Some customers want options to make the right decision. The same customers may expect a system to remember a preference based on many factors including repetitive behavior.

Delivering Context Is The Secret To Right Time Success

Context provides the key ingredient in improving outcomes. Why? Context provides the relevancy required for not only anticipation, but also prediction. For example, offering a premium channel upsell to an upset cable customer when their cable is down, may not be the wisest idea. Unfortunately, this happens too often. The customer is already upset that the issues have not been resolved and yet the company is still trying to sell instead of resolve an issue. However, offering a free appetizer triggered by a location based service during the morning commute, may lead to higher sales as this is a right time anticipation of a dinner time offer .

The Bottom Line: Start With Seven Dimensions of Context Drivers.

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Tuesday’s Tip: Dealing With The Real Problem In Social Business Adoption – The People!

Published on June 12, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Social Business Adoption Dependent On Employee Adoption

Social business is more than a technology decision. Many eager early adopters face challenges in adoption past the initial core team. As we move from eager early adopters to ubiquitous usage, an examination of some organizations who have failed at internal social business reveals five common barriers to adoption:

Poorly defined incentives. In the rush to convince everyone to work with each other, most organizations fail to design meaningful incentives for adoption. The reality – most folks collaborate only when they need to, not when they are told to.
Increase in actual effort. For many in the workforce, collaboration often means more work, not less work. Connectedness results in more interactions, some less meaningful than others. Increase in effort often shifts the status quo resulting in internal resistance.
Lack of choice in user experience. Time and time, people want to use the tool they are most comfortable with. For example, activity streams make sense for some folks who are used to high frequency, always on, information flows. However, those accustomed to using email as a task list and structured approach to filing information will find discomfort with activity streams.
Indifference to change. Inertia to do nothing often outweighs the calls for change. The workforce often prefers to do things the way they always have been. The workforce has seen many changes and at this point face change fatigue.
Failure to communicate the urgency. Business model shifts are not easy to communicate to the workforce. Veteran employees often develop coping mechanisms that define the new change as a reincarnation of the old change without understanding the nuance or urgency.

Overcoming Barriers Of Adoption Require A Mix of New and Classical Change Management Techniques

Despite compelling benefits to achieve better collaboration among teams, improved engagement among the workforce, and faster speed of internal communication, adoption efforts require careful design. As with any organizational change, it’s the people, stupid! The five barriers can be countered with the following five strategies (see Figure 1.): More…

News Analysis: The Implications Of Oracle’s Acquisition Of Taleo

Published on February 9, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Catch my colleague Yvette Cameron’s point of view here. She covers Future of Work for Constellation Research, Inc.

Oracle Plays Catch Up With Public Cloud Ambitions

On February 9th, Oracle announced its intention to acquire Dublin, CA based Taleo for $1.9B. Taleo is a cloud based talent management software provider with 5000 customers and 1400 employees. Key take aways to consider:

Moves by SAP and Oracle intend to compete with next generation cloud HCM companies. Taleo provides recruiting and on boarding, performance management and goal setting, compensation, succession, and learning and development. This complete suite tied to reporting and analytics is designed to streamline human resource operations and employee career management across retail and hospitality, travel, healthcare, media and entertainment, financial services, technology, and energy and mining. Marquee customers include Starbucks, Starwood, Hyatt, JP Morgan Chase, HP, Dell, Conde’Nast, United, American Airlines, Tesora, Blue Cross blue Shield, and Sutter Health.to customers.

Point of View (POV): Oracle sees advantages in acquiring a leading player in the talent management space . For years, both Taleo and SuccessFactors ate into Oracle’s existing customer base for talent management. Consequently, other cloud based HCM and HR Tech vendors such as Ceridian, CornerStone OnDemand, FairSail, Kinexa, UltimateSoftware, and Workday continue to attract line of business customers looking for innovations not being delivered by their core HCM providers (i.e. Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP). More importantly, cloud computing if properly designed can improve the pace of innovation delivered to customers.

Oracle continues to buy its way into a public cloud. Oracle continues to react to buyer sentiment and preference for cloud based solutions with this second major acquisition in what they term the “public cloud” space. Oracle purchased RightNow for $1.43B on October 24th to address its gaps in customer service solutions. The Taleo purchase addresses a gap in Talent Management solutions that rival SAP plugged with its recent acquisition of Success Factors for $3.4B .

Point of View (POV): These defensive plays indicate a realization that Cloud delivery emerges as the predominant option for applications. Based on Oracle’s current road map, one can expects Oracle to acquire its way into many other edge applications not listed on its Public Cloud road map (see Figure 1). Some other applications could include social business solutions, expense management, learning solutions, pricing management, identity management, and mobile device management. However, Oracle’s public cloud acquisition strategy so far lacks a key requirement – a choice for multi-tenant architected solutions. While both RightNow and Taleo have some modules that are multi-tenant, in most instances, these applications have been delivered in single tenancy or in multi-instance. Multi-tenant solutions will provide clients with the most efficient upgrade path and lowest long-term cost structure. The lack of a public strategy to address this issue remains a significant concern for customers and industry observers.

Figure 1. Oracle’s Vision For A Public Cloud

Source: Oracle Corporation

Seats matter most in a world of CoIT. Oracle hopes to gain massive cloud scale through Taleo’s 74 million transactions per day and 240 million candidates on Taleo Talent Exchange. The sheer number of users is massive.

POV: Unlike CRM or ERP, the play for HR is all about acquiring the biggest base of users – employees. With consumerization of IT (CoIT) in full swing, the goal is to grab as many users upfront and then over time cross-sell them into other edge applications which converge between enterprise and consumer. Why? The new strategy among the enterprise apps vendors is land and expand. The largest active user bases will win the war of attrition.

The Bottom Line for Customers: Goodbye On-Premises, Hello Cloud World!

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