Plateau Insights Conference 2009

I have been in the Bay Area for most of this week doing some consulting with clients and attending the Plateau user conference, Insights.  Plateau had a analyst session (at which I arrived late - sorry about that) where were able to get an update on the state of the business.  Plateau is profitable (on a EBITDA basis) and expects to grow revenues this year (along with a very high customer retention rate).  They have new customers this year such GlaxoSmithKline, Starbucks, Allianz, and United Technologies.

Plateau has seen an increasing number of customers buy multiple modules (our research has shown the same thing) and an increasing number of existing customers implementing additional modules (including WL Gore, Bio-Rad, Rolls-Royce, and T-Mobile).  There were the usual new product announcements (Talent Gateway - combination of a portal with social networking capabilities and Talent Management Suite - TMS - 6.1 which included a revamped and unified UI as well as enhancements to performance management and reporting/dashboards) and customer awards (finalists included Technip, Port of Seattle, GE Healthcare, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Energy, Diebold, and Siemens Global Shared Services).  The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) implementation was notable because it is running Plateau as a SaaS solution for all of the defense agencies. 

One of Plateau's customers, Bio-Rad, gave a keynote presentation about their strategy and vision for integrated talent management.  It was a compelling vision.  It is still on the journey, but they have implemented learning in the US (with plans to take that global).  It is also piloting performance management (mid-year reviews) and compensation management.  They are also doing a global instance consolidation of its core HRMS (Oracle PeopleSoft).

I did not get to spend a lot of time there, but it was valuable to see the interest and commitment of customers to improve talent management.

Comments

[Jeff Kristick]

Jim - thanks for making it to the event. We are also profitable on a GAAP basis.

Regards,
Jeff Kristick
SVP Marketing, Plateau