Lars From Mars, The Wookey, Carmen Miranda And Me
Island Of Lost Souls — 1932 When Ron and I moved near DC in 1977, there was a late night TV program, called “Creature Features,” that we loved. It was hosted by Dick Dyszel who, for reasons lost in the mists of marital life, I nicknamed Lars from Mars. Dick played rarely shown early SciFi films, many [...]
What Just Happened To The Talent Management Technology Spend?
What Happened To The Rest Of My Pie? I’m still working on my magnum opus (perhaps never to be finished?) post on the SAP/SFSF/Jobs2Web/all things consolidation in the HRM enterprise software market, but one question keeps pushing its way to the surface, demanding a quick post. It’s a much broader question: what just happened to the [...]
M&A Observations: Oracle, Infor And… SumTotal?
When SumTotal announced in April a not unexpected acquisition of Accero (really more of an aggregation because both firms were already owned by Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm with a now substantial stake in HRM #EnSW) along with the acquisition of CyberShift, I was not surprised. One could speculate at length, and others have done so, about the [...]
Lawson Software — A Very Sad Ending
Lars Lawson — The Symbol Of All Things Lawson I first wrote about the HRM enterprise software “Snowdons of Yesteryear” (with apologies to Joseph Heller for this misuse of his famous phrase, “where are the Snowdons of yesteryear” in Catch-22) in the earliest days of this blog (so 11/2009). In that original post, I reflected [...]
HRM #EnSW Vendor Consolidation Fairy Tales
“Fairy Tales May Come True, It Could Happen To You” There was a ton of consolidation in the HRM software and services market during 2010, and 2011 is off to a roaring start with SumTotal’s acquisition of GeoLearning. There’s a lot more to come, and speculation is already rampant about: which LMS vendor SuccessFactors and/or Peopleclick Authoria [...]
M&A Observations: Whither Goest Genesys?
Late-breaking news. Genesys’ buyer is PeopleStrategy, the current owner of Integral Systems (which was Dave Duffield’s predecessor company to PeopleSoft, so we’re going back here to the mid-80′s for it’s heyday). PeopleStrategy is led by Randy Cooper, who also led the buy of Genesys for Salary.com. Randy is very experienced with that generation of HRMS, having [...]
M&A Observations: StepStone Solutions Acquires MrTed — Who’s Next
Just in this morning was the announcement that StepStone Solutions is acquiring MrTed in what appears to be a very congenial coming together of two prominent European players in the talent management software market. In the interests of full disclosure, StepStone is a client with whom I’ve been working actively as this deal was getting [...]
SuccessFactors Acquires Inform: What’s The Real Issue Here?
There’s been some terrific discussion in the blogosphere about SuccessFactor’s recent acquisition of Inform, and I won’t repeat here what Ventana Research, Knowledge Infusion OnDemand and others have had to say about what looks like a smart move for SuccessFactors and a potentially important contribution to HR’s ongoing quest for the “holy grail” of actionable [...]
