Today, Cornerstone OnDemand announced the availability of “Cornerstone for Salesforce”, effectively rebranding CyberU and reinforcing its commitment to bringing learning and training directly into the business applications used by employees, partners and customers every day.
Cornerstone for Salesforce – a different focus
Where Cornerstone OnDemand has been focusing on enriching the capabilities and value proposition its talent suite (spanning the Recruiting Cloud, Learning Cloud, Performance Cloud and Extended Enterprise Cloud), the Cornerstone for Salesforce solution focuses on enriching the daily interactions taking place within the Salesforce applications with embedded training and development.
Bringing business intelligence, social and transactional support into enterprise business applications (like CRM, Financials, Manufacturing and others) reflects the trend toward more “purposeful applications”; a focus on “getting work done” more intuitively and effectively. The capabilities of Cornerstone for Salesforce reflect common learning management requirements, but the design intent is to have the LMS enable training and learning at the point where it is needed – i.e., while supporting a customer or while managing a sales opportunity – instead of having the LMS be “place you need to go for learning’’.
The Cornerstone for Salesforce capabilities include:
- eLearning, including instructor-led and virtual learning support;
- Certification and compliance for sales teams, employees, partners and customers;
- Individual and team development planning;
- Just-in-time training (training recommendations triggered from actions within the Salesforce application, such as changes in opportunity status, or when a new product is assigned to a sales or services team member);
- Individual and manager dashboard reporting and analytics;
- Social learning via integration with Salesforce Chatter;
- Embedded performance development and training through integration with Salesforce Work.com;
- A unified user experience and common reporting and analytics engine across the Salesforce platform; and
- Immediate integration with thousands of Salesforce AppExchange partners including hundreds offering support for eCommerce, surveys, assessments, and quizzes.
In addition to the capabilities mentioned above, consider also the extensibility of the Cornerstone platform. Unlike the packaged service offerings of yesterday’s legacy software (where custom development is repurposed to other clients through a pre-packaged consulting engagements), SaaS providers like Cornerstone can develop custom code for clients – or provide the development platform for clients’ own use – and enable other clients to access these innovations through a downloadable library of solution extensions. SaaS by its nature accelerates the pace of innovation; an extensible platform amplifies that acceleration even more. Not every SaaS vendor takes this approach today, but Cornerstone has been supporting this for years. Cornerstone for Salesforce empowers its partners and customers with an extensible LMS platform.
My POV
The launch of Cornerstone for Salesforce is an important move for Cornerstone as more and more organizations look to the AppExchange and natively developed Force.com applications to extend their Salesforce.com investment.
Today Cornerstone supports three distinct platform offerings: Cornerstone OnDemand, Cornerstone for Salesforce, and CSB (formerly Sonar6). Rather than being distractions, I expect each offering will inform the other with best practices and lessons learned. (We’ve seen this already, as the innovative “helicopter review” from the CSB solution is making its way into the Cornerstone Performance Cloud; and the domain expertise from the Cornerstone Learning cloud heavily influenced initial Cornerstone for Salesforce capabilities).
The Cornerstone OnDemand suite and CSB solution will continue to be important options for buyers in the HCM marketplace. For Salesforce.com customers, a new option has emerged.
Cornerstone for Salesforce is a market-tested solution, with large clients (such as Salesforce.com) relying upon it today for learning and training across their extended enterprise. Cornerstone for Salesforce should be on the shortlist of any Salesforce customer seeking intuitive, contextual learning and development support for its employees, partners and customers.
Filed under: Cloud, Cornerstone OnDemand, HCM, Learning and Development, Mobile/Social, SaaS HCM, Salesforce.com, Talent Management Tagged: Apps Strategy, Cloud, constellation research, Cornerstone OnDemand, CSB, CSOD, future of work, HCM, HR Tech, LMS, Mobile, Next Generation apps, SaaS, salesforce.com, Social, Social Enterprise, Social Learning, Software as a service, Talent Management, yvette cameron 
