A Look Back at the History of Gartner's Coverage of Talent Management Applications (Part 3)

By the end of 2003, I knew that I needed to focus more on talent management application vendors.  So, I made the decision to get more detailed foundation research out on talent management applications so I put the HRMS research on the backburner for a while.  In 2004, Gartner introduced a new note type called a MarketScope to complement Magic Quadrants.  MarketScopes were intended to be used for early stage as well as late stage markets.  This was perfect for Employee Performance Management.  It was definitely at an early stage.  So,  dived in and started using the new note type.  The standards for it were still evolving (including titles) so I ended up including about four notes worth of material in the "Employee Performance Management Software MarketScope" published in June 2004.  The note is still worth a read today (subscription required) because the functional footprint and trends still largely hold true today.  As I look at the vendors we evaluated, it is interesting to see how much consolidation has happened (the following vendors we evaluated have since been acquired):

• Vurv acquired KnowledgePoint from CCH (now Vurv is about to be acquired by Taleo)
• Cezanne merged with HRM Software
• SilkRoad technology acquired Human Asset Technologies
• Vurv acquired InScope
• Beeline acquired Integrated Performance Systems
• Oracle acquired PeopleSoft and Siebel
• NICE acquired Performix

There were also acquisitions that had been done by the vendors we were evaluating.  Authoria had acquired Advanced Information Management (AIM).  Workscape had acquired Performaworks.  Anyway, I digress.  Most of the vendors that we rated Positive or Strong Positive continued to grow and mature.  We did not get it all right.  Performix struggled to find the right strategy (focus on related niches to call centers or go more general).  Workscape struggled with the Performaworks acquisition (eventually buiding their own solution).

This gave us a great starting point in our talent management coverage.  We followed that up with "MarketScope: E-Recruitment Sofware" in December 2004.  This time I realized that I should not put all everything in one note.  I published three other notes "Companies Need to Define E-Recruitment Software", "Choose an E-Recruitment SW Infrastructure Provider Carefully" and "E-Recruitment Software Market Trends, Q404".  I know these are not the best titles.  The first note provides more detail on what we include in the definition of E-Recruitment software (still largely true today).  The second note discussed the partnering landscape for solutions embedded in e-recruitment offerings like resume parsing, search, background checking, etc.  The third note is actually a decent title, but we have not updated it since (we discuss the trends in each MarketScope/MQ note) so the Q404 thing was not really necessary.  In Part 4, I will discuss how we made our way back to the suite concept.