Integrated Talent Management (ITM) Market Dynamics – Mergers and Acquisitions

The ITM market is in the midst of a period of strong growth, fueled by the desire of many organizations to increase the impact of their people-related investments, especially those that involve attracting, developing and retaining the firm’s talent. This has sparked a wave of investment in ITM capabilities throughout the entire market ecosystem, including content providers, consultants, and technology providers of all types. Of course, vendors have also invested a great deal in marketing their ITM capabilities, and have aggressively sought to expand via venture funding, acquisition, partnerships, and organic development. During the past three years the market has experienced increased volatility, with a number of vendors making significant market moves.

 

Recently we talked about some of the funding investments made in vendors that are in the ITM space. Below are some of the major merger and acquisition activity that has taken place affecting the ITM space over the past couple of years:

 

Kronos – acquired Unicru (hourly recruiting specialist) in July 2006, was taken private by Hellman & Friedman in June 2007, then added Deploy Solutions (salary and hourly recruiting) in October 2007

 

ADP – acquired recruiting vendor VirtualEdge in October 2006

 

Kenexa – acquired recruiting vendors WebHire and BrassRing in 2006, and Recruitment Process Outsource (RPO) provider Quorum in 2007

 

Ultimate Software acquired performance and competency management vendor RTIX in October 2006

 

SumTotal – acquired performance management vendor MindSolve in November 2006

 

PreVisor – launched in January 2006 as a result of the merger of assessment vendors Qwiz, ePredix and PDRI, the firm has since acquired multiple boutique assessment firms, including Brainbench, Talent Technologies, and CraftSystems

 

Plateau Systems purchased compensation specialist NuvoSoft in February 2007

 

Ceridian – taken private by Thomas H. Lee Partners and Fidelity National Financial in November 2007

 

StepStone Solutions – purchased German-based talent management provider ExecuTrack in 2006

 

Workstream – announced in February 2008 that it will merge with HCM software aggregator and HRO provider Empagio. Workstream later pulled out of this deal which we questioned about a month ago as to why, and we still don’t have clear answers.

 

Taleo – announced on May 6, 2008 that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Vurv Technology, Inc. for approximately $128.8 million in cash and stock. As we know, the deal was finalized a short while later.

 

It will be interesting to revisit some of these acquisitions and mergers at a later date to see how they worked out for the vendors and the customers involved.

 

Solving a piece of the puzzle… 
Matt Lafata, HRchitect