IBM Acquires Kenexa To Help Customers Create A Smarter Workforce

IBM Acquires Kenexa To Help Customers Create A Smarter Workforce: Today IBM announced the acquisition of Kenexa, one of the leading providers of talent management (a fancy term for Human Resources) software. This move follows similar deals by IBM's competitors, such as Salesforce acquiring Rypple, SAP acquiring SuccessFactors and Oracle acquiring Taleo. See here for a full list of social business acquisitions.

Kenexa, which provides cloud based solutions for HR functions such as recruitment, on-boarding, learning management, career development, etc. will become part of IBM Collaboration Solutions (formerly known as Lotus) run by General Manager Alistair Renee. They will also work closely with IBM's Global Process Services organization, led by Lori Steele.

For the last few years, the IBM Collaboration Solutions division has been focused on helping customers learn about and deploy "social business solutions". In the early days, this primarily meant creating online communities as places where people could share knowledge and become better connected to their colleagues all across the organization. Now as the benefits of social business are becoming more apparent, we're seeing what I refer to as "an evolution from simple sharing and connecting to enhancing core business processes". IBM is hoping that this is just what the acquisition of Kenexa will provide, a way to use talent management to improve roles likes Sales and Marketing, creating what IBM refers to as a Smarter Workforce.

A Smarter Workforce is created by combining Social, Talent Management and Analytics functions so that people can make better informed decisions, react quicker to situations and find the right information when and where they need it.








MyPOV

• Product Integration: It will be interesting to see how IBM combines (or at least integrates) Kenexa into the IBM Connections portfolio. By augmenting some of the core HR processes with social functions such as commenting, liking and tagging (in theory) employees should be able to discover the colleagues and content that can help them get their work done more effectively. They key here is that IBM will be focusing on use cases that help find the right people with the right skills at the right time, and then inserting them into a process to positively affect the outcome. I hope this goes beyond just creating static events in the activity stream, and instead IBM delivers integrated experiences where HR information can be directly embedded into places like Connections profiles and communities, and vice versa. On the Connections side, the development team has been working for more than two years on technologies such as OpenSocial to help with integration. Does/will Kenexa support OpenSocial or will integration be done at the API level? I expect the integration will be difficult, both from a technology standpoint and the internal IBM resources (people) needed to make it happen. Perhaps there are some good opportunities here for Business Partners to help create tools and fill in the gaps.


• Timing: Much like Microsoft, IBM is not known for their rapid product deliverables. Even though the deal is expected to close in December, I expect to see some type of demo (real, or mocked up) of Kenexa integration at Lotusphere 2013, sorry I mean the newly renamed IBM Connect 2013.


• Architecture: Cloud or On-premises? While a cloud based offering has been hinted at, currently the majority of IBM Connections deployments are on-premises. That means any integration with Kenexa's cloud based platform will have to occur in a hybrid model. IBM will need to make sure the user experience is as seamless as possible (or else adoption will be low) and similarly ensure security and administration between the two systems works well.


• The competition: The integration of social business and talent management is not unique to IBM. As mentioned above Salesforce, SAP and Oracle are all big players in this space, and compared to them IBM is at least a year behind. On a smaller scale, Socialtext and PeopleFluent are now both owned by the same company and have announced future integrations. Finally, while they don't have built in features, both Jive and Yammer provide integration with various HR vendors and that list is increasing as their business partners ecosystems expand. In order to differentiate themselves, IBM will need to focus on areas such as analytics and services.

Congratulations to the IBM and Kenexa teams. While this deal strikes me as a little bit of IBM playing catch up, the market for combined social and talent management is really just getting started. There will be challenges, but IBM's use-case driven approach should help them explain the potential benefits to customers and future prospects.





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