Of course this is a personal exercise - anyone can come to an different result - here is what I did: I picked the top 8 events, news, acquisitions, conferences, analyst events etc. of the quarter, they had to have a blog post published by yours truly. Threw them in a bucket, draw them and then had them 'play' out the bracket... based on what myPOV was in regards of enterprise relevance and impact for our clients, the CxOs, with special weight to people leaders out there. Needless to say - some where easier, some harder.
Here you go for Q1 2016 - all related to Future of Work - the research area that covers how, when, what and if we work, what and how we get paid, stay motivated and balance the work / life relationship.
[Apologies - time to market forced me to play the bracket right to left.]
Round #1 Dropouts
- Unit4 Assistant / Slack Integration - Assistants were the key new functionality talked about in 2016, Unit4 was the first traditional ERP vendor coming out with an across suite assistant. Slack with its instant chat tool never got out of the headlines, and many vendors have jumped on the Slack band wagon - again Unit4 was the first larger ERP vendor to provide an integration (read here). But Ceridian with its broad next generation capabilities wins this round (read more here), capturing more people leaders mind share.
- Workday France Payroll - Announced for over two years, Workday delivered on is France payroll (read here), always good to deliver (read more here). But the impact was mainly with international and French clients, and pales compared to the cross suite innovation unveiled by SAP SuccessFactors. (more here).
- VMware Workspace One - VMware EUC has been on a roll, capturing market share and delivering (finally) for the industry on the long time promise of VDI, which changes fundamentally the Human / Machine relationship, away from the traditional PC (read here). But the progress ADP showed at Meeting of the Minds was more relevant for people leaders across the country (see here).
- Workato Bots - Workato kept innovating around its end user, no code integration platform, which changes the Future of Work as it enables business users to build their own work environment, solving the application integration problem (read here). However, Ultimate at UltiConnect provided more impact for people leaders in Q1 2016 (more here).
Round #2 Dropouts
- SAP SuccessFactors platform innovation - SuccessFactors (finally went back to broad across suite platform enhancements (e.g. Intelligent Services, Machine Learning) and renovation (e.g. new UI), read more here. But Ceridian pushed the envelope even more on all fronts (read here), very close but Ceridian wins. After all the only vendor doing payroll conversion from old to new in the multiple 100s each month.
- Ultimate UltiConnect - A good conference for Ultimate with a ton of innovation, interesting new approaches (e.g. Leadership Action) read more here, but ADP with Meeting of the Minds unwrapped their Data as a Service offering on pay grades and the ADP Data Cloud, a win by a buzzer beater here, too (read more here).
Q1 Finals - Ceridian wins over ADP
Well the semifinals were close, this one was even closer, both vendors pushed across the board, but Ceridian's push was even broader than ADP's (more here). Maybe because Analytics / Data as a Service and Benchmarking are still not the HR leaders best friend, but Ceridian got its user base a little more energized (more here). Congrats to Ceridian to making it to the 2016 finals!
How would you have scored the Q1 2016 news? Please comment!
