Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Today’s intense competitive pressures demand that organizations utilize their human capital more effectively. Taleo has been steadily growing as a provider of talent management by offering its applications and platform through software as a service (SaaS). Now it has advanced into what they call Talent Intelligence that can help organizations gain new insights on their workforce and individual employees by examining their potential and areas for improvement. Research has shown that performance is at risk when individuals doubt that their contribution is fully valued and lack confidence that executives are compensating them appropriately. Talent Intelligence can help alleviate these issues. Adding to its availability for large organizations, Taleo has released a version for small and midsize businesses to help organizations of any size manage their talent better.

Taleo Analytics provides a convenient user experience with prebuilt capabilities in an analytical dashboard that provides metrics and performance indicators along with reports for use by operational managers and executives as well as those in human resources. Like the company’s other applications, it is built on the Taleo Cloud platform. Taleo says customers use it to manage over 200 million employees or talent profiles, but Taleo must convince organizations that it can support the capabilities on a large scale no matter what applications they use for recruiting, performance, compensation, goal setting and succession planning. It is common for sources of data to be a heterogeneous mix of applications that analysts and managers access with analytics and business intelligence or are integrated into a data warehouse.  I have written about the importance of workforce analytics for every size of organization; Taleo adds to its existing analytics capabilities to help customers further these efforts.

Taleo has been gaining new customers while retaining existing ones and recently announced it has signed up 225 new customers and now serves more than 4,700 organizations. This growth has helped validate its cloud computing strategy and technology platform; as well as expanding its own portfolio the company has built a set of online communities called the Talent Grid. Taleo has to compete against strong opponents such as Softscape, Success Factors and Workscape, which I have written about recently, too. Taleo recently brought out a compensation application derived from its acquisition of Worldwide Compensation in January. It will need to get this application accepted in companies with large workforces, starting with those that use Taleo’s products for recruiting and performance management. I expect Taleo to continue its growth, but to do that it will need to increase awareness on the functionality of its applications and platform on the Internet and build a more interactive community of customers.

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Regards,

Mark Smith – CEO & EVP Research