Kronos executes – 2014 will be key

The conference was well attended with approximately 1700 attendees, it’s largely seen as an educational event – with an impressive number of training sessions being scheduled. 

And the user base is – compared to other enterprise software conferences – amazingly open on sharing experiences and challenges. It looks like the challenges around implementing workforce management software are such, that companies are open and ready to share them with their peers. This is even more interesting since Kronos has a very strong vertical focus – with separating sessions, tracks, meals and events by industry vertical – all the way to the lanyard color of attendee’s name tags. So customers are practically sharing best practices and lessons learnt with their peers.

Good Keynote

As usual with user conferences, the first day was dominated by the keynote – delivered by Kronos CEO Aron Ain. Ain did a good job on stage, coupled with some appreciated humor and remarkably he delivered his part of the keynote without any supporting slides, which was a welcome change. 

Kronos CEO Aron Ain on stage

No keynote without customer testimonials – well done and on stage – and one of them, the City of Houston, was one of the highlights of the 2013 user conference keynotes: It does not get much cooler than having a customer on stage talking live about their experiences, demoing by themselves their implementation of analytics – live – on an iPad. Tough to top. And equally Fifth Third Bank was strong reference for Kronos. 

The guest speaker was Jeremy Gutsche, the founder of trendhunter.com, who delivered an energetic presentation – only challenge was how relevant the more generic and mostly B2C trends were for the audience.

What’s new?

Kronos  unleashed a number of press releases – let’s look at the key ones:

• Kronos cloud efforts are runningat full steam with now 9000 organizations using the Kronos Cloud. It’s not clear what percentage of the Kronos customer base that is – but certainly there is interest in the customer base to move to cloud. The most mentioned drivers by both customers and prospects were the lower deployment costs and the ability to move update and upgrade burdens to Kronos. Unfortunately Constellation Research did not have the time to dig in more in detail into the Kronos cloud infrastructure – so we can’t cast a vote at this time how much this maybe a hosted vs. a true cloud offering. Regardless of this -  customers seem to content when using the cloud products and interested to even eager to move to them

• Kronos keeps investing into key mobilefunctionality – as more and more workforce management activity is not recorded on a desktop but on a mobile device. The added offline capability is a welcome feature, as wireless network coverage is still not ubiquitous and we wish more HCM vendors would take notice and provide likewise offline capabilities for their mobile offering. Later this year geo-fencing capability is coming - a key convenience and automation feature for workforce management software. And finally the demos all showed neat annotation capabilities where a user can mark critical data and then share the annotations and / or screenshots with other users. With availability for iOS, Android and Blackberry Kronos covers the key platfor

• Socialis a trend not excluding workforce management, so Kronos (wisely we think) decided not to build but to partner – in this case with Tibco’s tibbr product, to bring better social practices and collaboration to its user base. The company even dabbles into gamification – though only through allowing managers to post statistics into an activity steam – a good starting point.
  In our view overall a smart move as any shift planner knows that every day work is a communication and social challenge. The product will ship later in the year and we look forward to see its first incarnation.

• Equally like social – there is no enterprise software user conference in 2013 that does not touch analytics. Kronos is partnering (wisely again we think) with Microstrategy and delivers a number of powerful data visualization and exploration capabilities around workforce management data. Unfortunately - like many other vendors – Kronos is using the faux analytics term – describing a nicer version of dashboarding and not enabling true analytics that take action or at least suggest an action. But what isn’t can still come true later.  

• And let’s not forget the Kronos is also a hardware company, buildingand selling the inTouch devices – that keep getting upgraded regularly. The ability to clock in without a badge, thanks to a high quality optical sensor, will certainly be an efficiency booster for this scenario. And of course it supports touch and plugs well in across connectivity options and firewalls.

Addressing Quality Issues

Kronos customers have been plagued by desktop side Java that does not run beyond Java 6, causing a lot of headaches and even compelling them to take system upgrades. The good news is, that Kronos is eliminating the client side Java and replacing the former flash UI with HTML5 – but it wasn’t clear what the company will do with client side logic – at least not when we asked the VP of Global Product Management Bill Bartow in one of our meetings. 

And beyond the Java issues customers also mentioned a number of quality problems. But the good news is that Kronos is actively addressing these issues.

And as Constellation Research has stated before – platform and quality issues – though undesirable – are a realistic ingredient when dealing with enterprise software. What matter is how well does the vendor respond, resolve the issues in partnership with the affected customers and then implements the right safe guards to avoid future challenges. And to give Kronos credit the company is certainly aware of this and knows that the it has to deliver high quality products with its December releases.

Charitable Tweeting

It was a nice touch by Kronos to donate $5 per tweet (the amount was increased) containing the conference hashtag #KW2013 up to a $15k limit for a charitable cause - certainly a classy move and probably a very good return on marketing. Read more about it on my original post here. 

Going forward

Kronos is doing all the right things addressing three of the key disruptors for enterprise software with mobile, social and analytics. The company is certainly most progressed on the mobile side, then analytics and then social – but all three topics should be addressed with significant enough breadth and depth by end of 2014 – so the question is – what is next for Kronos on the product side. 

Earlier in 2013 Kronos unveiled its partnership with SAP Sucessfactors - Successfactors president Shawn Price was on stage with Ain - and from all we heard from executives and customers the parnership of combined sales team selling their respective products is going well. But there needs to be more than a cloud partnerhip for Kronos. 

So the analyst and blogger community probed the executive team many times on this – but the answer has been always that the company will stick to the workforce automation theme. So no possible forays into core HR, payroll, e-Learning, performance management etc. areas. The most that could be extracted from Kronos CEO Ain was, that the company wants to go after the remainder of their customers employees, that they do not reach – yet. If this means a Kronos ambition into project management – remains to be seen.

But let’s not forget that the company is in the enviable position to face only few and relatively weaker competitors in North America and has practically no competition for global workforce management needs.

MyPOV

It’s good to see an enterprise software vendor executing and Kronos certainly is executing well. And while the company needs to make sure to deliver quality software and deliver on its growth plans both up and down scale in the market and globally – it must be a good time for Kronos right now. And good times for the vendor translate – with some delay – to good times for the customer base. And the customer base certainly had a good time in Orlando.

Longer term – later in 2014 – Kronos will have to address strategic growth plans, that in our view need to be fueled by expanding the automation portfolio that Kronos offers. But let’s get customers and our hands on the December releases first.

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We did a Storify of key tweets from the keynote that you can find here.