Archive for the ‘Software as a Service’ Category

More SaaS Flexibility than Workday

September 23, 2008

The chatter around Harry’s comments about SaaS continues — this time it’s the interview of Dave Duffield on Bill Kutik’s radio show. I actually liked the way Dave presented it. The dialogue continues to help me refine my thinking on why what we’re doing is truly differentiated. To wit, a few facts:

  • 85% of the companies that have bought our new talent management products have opted for a licensing model other than a subscription.  Why?  Because customers asked.  They want to own the software that they are acquiring for such a strategic purpose (not so important for payroll processing, I’d say…).
  • 100% of those same companies have opted for a managed service delivery model — a uniform version of the software, fully managed by Lawson.  So they’re enjoying all of the benefits that Dave said were so important.  Not one customer is on the ‘patch-fix treadmill.’  From a delivery perspective, it’s SaaS, but because it’s not sold as a subscription, I guess the purists would criticize me for labelling it that way, so I won’t.
  • 75% of our customers in the pipeline have expressed a preference to own the software vs. renting it via subscription.  I anticipate the vast majority of them will still opt to have Lawson manage the environment — the benefit of the SaaS delivery model is real, and customers will continue to opt for it in large numbers.  It’s paying the license forever that doesn’t make any sense.

At the end of the day, customers buying talent management solutions want choice.  If companies like Lawson and Workday deliver great value managing the environment and application, why would they want to do it themselves?  But when the software takes hold in the company and offers mission critical benefits, the value of having an ownership stake in that product will be beneficial.  From a cost perspective, because they can pay for just the portions that provide ongoing value (staying off the ‘treadmill’), Lawson clients will reap a more attractive long-term return on their investment.

Note to Bill Kutik:  as far as backpedaling, I’m not sure I see it.  While we are offering customers more options, they are all centered around delivering great high-quality software applications to customers, advancing our economies of scale around managed care and building the kind of market share that will ultimately define Lawson as the gorilla in this market.  SaaS or otherwise.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in SHCM launch, Software as a Service, talent management | 3 Comments »

I’m sticking to my Guns

April 27, 2008

One more post about my experience at the HR forum two weeks ago………….

Some of you are probably aware that this event has a ‘pay for play’ element to it — suppliers pay to participate, and the delegates attend for free in exchange for a commitment to a certain number of meetings to hear about offerings from the various suppliers.  There’s an elaborate (and I would say effective) matching process to get folks with like interests talking to each other.  But with the goal to make sure that every supplier gets a certain number of ‘meetings,’ you always have a few with someone you quickly discover couldn’t care less about what you have to offer (or vice versa). 

Knowing there would be some of that (and in some cases I could even tell in advance), these delegates became my ‘focus group’ targets — I tested our strategies to see how these folks would react eventhough they probably wouldn’t be our target customer.  A particularly insightful meeting was with a large, national retailer with over 100,000 employees who’s identity I will opt not to disclose.  The delegate, a senior HR person, was telling me about their talent management technology strategy, and the conversation went something like this (paraphrased for brevity, and might slightly miss on a detail or two):

Supplier (me):  How are you addressing your talent management technology needs?
Delegate:  We have a enterprise-wide LMS installed that’s having a real impact on delivering training in the stores, we just started an implementation of a recruiting system, and performance management is next.
Supplier:  How many vendors are providing that technology?
Delegate:  Three.
Supplier:  Are you concerned with the issues of technical integration?  Do you hope to leverage infrastructure like organizational and supervisor structure across those products?
Delegate:  Definitely.
Supplier:  How are you going to do it?  Is IT engaged in the process?
Delegate:  <moment of silence>.. IT is looking at it

And so went the discussion..we also explored how they anticipated leveraging data for decision-making across the full organizational development value chain, and concluded that while those issues had been discussed, these integration elements (see my previous post) are not central to the creation of their technology strategy — at the moment.

I would anticipate that this organization has a real shot at efficient and effective management of their core transactional business processes in talent management.  For training, they’re already doing it.  But at the end of the day, after all those operational benefits are achieved and they want to really get those systems talking together they are either going to spend a fortune consolidating data into one of those systems (and hope that the one is good enough to manage the data from the others) or they will be building the mother-of-all-data-warehouses.  And let’s face it — HR is always number 11 on a priority list of 10, and after all of the money they’ve spent on getting the operational stuff right it will require real clout to get the funding for yet another major HR technology initiative.

Everyone knows about my bias here — that an integrated, ERP-class talent management solution aligned with the system-of-record data about people is the only realistic way for organizations to do breakthrough talent management.  It’s about great operational efficiency AND actionable data about people, and the organizations that get both right will be at a significant advantage.

Posted in Lawson, SHCM launch, Software as a Service, performance management, succession management, talent management | Leave a Comment »

We Must Be Doing Something Right

March 8, 2008

I recently read a research report authored by Nate Swanson at ThinkEquity research about the Talent Management space. He did a very nice job of articulating what he thought the ultimate winners in HCM will need in order to be successful in our market. He made four key points (and I’m virtually quoting him here):

  • A vision of creating the system-of-record for all employee data
  • Deployed in a pure on-demand software model
  • With applications that were built organically (for the most part)
  • That are scalable and can meet the needs of both large and small businesses
  • Both globally and locally
  • Created for mass consumption, as most HCM applications will be used by employees across the entire organization

I was delighted to read about his perspective on the market given how nicely aligned it is with what we’re doing at Lawson.  Specifically:

  1. The system-of-record issues are central to delivering broad talent management solutions at low cost, and no best-of-breed vendors can come close to claiming the ability to address them.
  2. Thanks to the Lawson Landmark platform 100% of our application has been built organically.  Oh ok: we are getting some help with parsing resumes from our friends at Talent Technology.
  3. Our product will prove to be scalable and it was global from the first day we started it (and we’ve proven it by having one of our very first customers in France).
  4. With our introduction of the notion of spaces, we are showing just how effectively we can tackle mass consumption — things like using Outlook for core manager self-service and Facebook to let companies virally market their job openings (never mind spaces within the Lawson UI for HR generalists, recruiters, etc).

Best of all, I can’t wait until next week when we can demonstrate it all, front-and-center at our user conference in Las Vegas.   For those of you attending, be sure to let me know if you think we’re delivering on Nate’s viewpoint!

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Lawson, SHCM launch, Software as a Service, performance management, talent management | 1 Comment »