I am back on the road this week – May is a busy month in analyst land – this time with my colleague Laci Loew attending Cornerstone Convergence ’15. Laci filed her report on the opening day, so I’ll leave you with a few thoughts from Day 2 and the great conversations I had this week.
This is not my first Convergence event, and it has been interesting to see how the Cornerstone leadership team and product have evolved. From a learning start-up to one of the last remaining stand-alone talent management suites, Cornerstone has had quite a journey in the past 16 years. In light of this journey, I wanted to highlight three observations on where the organization stands today.
Filling in the gaps. The past several years have brought many additions to the product suite offered by Cornerstone, building from its original learning and extended enterprise clouds to a set of offerings encompassing the entire employee lifecycle — including recruiting, onboarding, performance management, compensation, and succession. Many of the updates shared this year were reflective of Cornerstone’s mission to fill in the gaps of its offering to be able to match the functionality of best-of-breed solutions in each of these areas. These necessary enhancements help round out the suite solution and offer opportunities for Cornerstone to expand its relationship with current clients.
Leveraging extended enterprise expertise. One of the earliest capabilities delivered by the organization was an extended enterprise learning solution. These solutions are designed to not only facilitate the logistics of training individuals outside the organization – resellers, customers, channel partners – but also handling the e-commerce needs to support external training where needed. This capability will become increasingly important I believe, because an increasing number of organizations are operating in a networked marketplace and depend on each other to achieve their business goals.
A powerful partner network. Cornerstone has built a strong network of partners that believe in its vision of cloud computing and offer complementary solutions and services. These include partners that focus on helping organizations think through the processes and strategy that they are enabling with Cornerstone technology, and ensuring that there is ongoing alignment and process improvement. These partners bring the layer of process and functional expertise that tools alone cannot address, enhancing user success with Cornerstone solutions.
–Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi
