With many of my waking moments being occupied by the near-manic pursuit of a college short list for not one but two daughters in their senior year, my blogging has fallen off the cliff. Add to the mix the insanity of preparing to do the HR tech shootout, and overstimulation reigns.
But I’ve got the shootout behind me, and the entire Lawson team was beaming with pride and enthusiasm over our performance….in spite of 2nd place. For me, it’s primarily about showing off the work of our amazing employees and giving them a dose of adrenaline for the continued work of building, fixing, supporting, selling and implementing these great products. Plus lots of customers get to see a perspective on our stuff they probably wouldn’t see otherwise. It’s all good.
The HR capitalist did a good job of summarizing the highlights, so I won’t bother. Look here for a recap.
This one takes a village, and as the post notes, the entire population was sitting behind Dave while he ran the computer. But I couldn’t have done it without all of them — my sincere thanks to the entire Lawson team. It was a great experience, and I also appreciate all of the audience support for our products and the way we presented them. And seriously — reading from a script? I couldn’t imagine doing it. Ever.
Perceptive HR Technology 
Larry, you so right about “it takes a village” and that reading from a script just isn’t either of us. You’ve seen my notes so know that I think that all of the vendors in the shootout are heroes in my book, and their customers are lucky to have such champions for making sure our industry keeps moving forward. Job well done!
Larry, let me add my congratulations on the Lawson team’s performance in the Shootout, and especially yours. You were one of the few who presented without a script, and your mastery of your own product was evident every second.
The software look great; you were equally terrific; and your Second Place finish was indisputable since you took Second in every scenario. In years past, a contestant has issue a press release for that accomplishment (not winning) and you did beat a bigger ERP, SAP, and another Talent Management Suite vendor, Plateau. No mean feat, and all of you should be justly proud.
People’s software looked great. It’s come a long way in the last two years and that is good for our customers and the category.
Your outlook integration looked good, SAP looked better than it scored and Plateau was competitive. Salary.com is a best of breed player and had the better software and embedded content for the Shootout. I think we did more talent management development work (100+ projects) in the past two years than the others. Grousing about anything else sounds like sour grapes and bad leadership to me. Kudo’s to all the teams for great work in moving the category forward with much better products.
Keep it up Bill. Your competition helps drive the category forward each year.
Larry,
Nice looking blog and great content. Why do you think HR Tech does not focus more on HRIS and HRMS solutions? There is still obviously a market for those solutions. I would imagine that Lawson is selling far more HRMS and payroll than talent management. Yet, Talent managment seems to be the only topic anyone is writing about.
By the way I’m the President and Owner of CompareHRIS.com/a> and hr-softwareblog.com/a>. I’ve had enjoyed working with the marketing staff at Lawson. Good group of people you guys have over there.
Thanks,
Clay C. Scroggin
CompareHRIS.com/a>
Talent management is where the growth and investment is at the moment. While the core HRMS marketplace is pretty big, growth rates are very low. The talent management market is small, but growing very rapidly. And the talent management space has attracted a fair amount of venture capital as well, which drives alot of marketing spend that dominates what people are talking about.
Thanks Larry for posting this valuable post this is good post on HR technology shoot out.thanks for sharing with us.