What will I learn from evaluating the market place?

Performance and Talent Management is the fastest-growing sector among the HR applications in the marketplace. You'll find that the vendors fall into one of two major categories: providers of Pure bred Performance Management solutions and Peripheral vendors who specialize in some other HR area and hope to get a piece of the Performance & Talent Management pie.

Pure Bred Performance Management - Pure-bred vendors who aim for a leadership position need to invest significant financial resources to build a market leading solution and an extremely high-caliber pool of talent to compete effectively. SuccessFactors has done so more than any other vendor as evidenced by the greatest market share (according to Bersin Associates), the largest customer base (both in number of clients and in number of users), proven ability to meet needs of all-sized companies (Yankee Group), the broadest and deepest fully integrated, internal -suite, and one of the largest companies on the market by employee population. We continue to make these investments, so you don't have to.

Peripheral vendors use a number of different strategies to supplement their historically limited product suites. A number of vendors that today offer Performance & Talent Management solutions actually specialize in areas such as Learning Management Systems (LMS), Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), Payroll, HRIS, Compensation, and HR Consulting. Having realized the critical strategic role that Performance & Talent Management plays, they are scrambling to fill out their product lines by developing new components or by acquiring companies that provide those components. Make sure to have a look at the geneology of your vendor choices. Many vendors lack expertise in building applications in this space. Others are in the position of forcing different code bases to work together after an acquisition. Either of these situations have short term service and long-term product development issues that may impact your success.