Trip Report - 2010 ADP Meeting of the Minds

I spent a couple of days last week attending ADP’s Meeting of the Minds conference.  This conference is targeted primarily at National Accounts customers (more than 1,000 employees in the U.S.) though some of the attendees and agenda is dedicated to the needs of multinational customers.   There were approximately 800 attendees, up about 30% from 2009 (a good sign for conference attendance in 2010).  It is primarily a conference for practitioners that use ADP solutions, but they do have a separate executive track.

ADP continues to execute on its primary strategy – to be a full service provider of HCM-related services and the technology required to deliver those services.  There was a clear emphasis on its expanded portfolio in the keynote presentations that featured discussion of its partnership with Cornerstone OnDemand for Talent Management software (to complement its own VirtualEdge solution for recruiting).  In addition, GlobalView, its solution for multinational customers, figured prominently with the announcement of GlobalView Select which integrates the GlobalView offering (based on SAP) with its Streamline offering (payroll solution for small employee populations delivered through country-specific solutions from ADP as well as partners).  GlobalView currently has 92 customers (68 live in 38 countries) with an average customer size of more than 11,000 employees.  Streamline has more than 300 customers in 70 countries with an average customer size of ~280 employees.

I went to product-related sessions for Enterprise and PayForce.  The main message from these sessions was that ADP continues to invest in product line improvements.  In addition, ADP wants to leverage more common development across product lines.  ADP Portal is becoming the front end and ADP Reporting is becoming the common reporting environment.  The key word is “becoming”.  It was clear from customer questions that the integration is clearly a work in progress.  There are still differences in user interface and navigation between, for example, Enterprise, VirtualEdge, Talent Management (from Cornerstone), Health and Welfare Service Engine (HWSE), Total Compensation, and Workforce Management (resells Kronos).  Improving user experience is a top development priority.

I had a chance to see some very good customer presentations.  Ed Golitko from EMC provided a strong business view of their GlobalView deployment and partnership with ADP.  Nury Plumley from Agilent (along with its partner Pinstripe) did a nice overview of their social recruiting strategy and lessons learned.

It was the first user conference to which ADP has invited analysts.  I appreciate their willingness to open up to the analyst community.

Comments

[Antoine Hepburn]

Jim,

This is all a Gartner analyst can produce? Regurgitate a vendor's marketing hype? I would have expected, not necessarily all the juiciest dirt, but some credible critique, since we all know that clients are raely exhilarated by their vendors' shortcomings. But obviously such information is not forthcoming from Gartner which is becoming just a cheerleader for IT vendors. Even Pravda is more credible

[Jim]

Antoine,

I do not think it is marketing hype. I laid out a few facts and what I thought was interesting at the conference (like the customer presentations). As the title indicated, it was a trip report. The post was not meant to be analysis with customer advice. When I do that kind of work, it is published on the Gartner.com site for our clients. This is a personal blog.