It’s been a year since I last talked with you about Ultimate Software and its approach to process. As a leading provider of HCM solutions, Ultimate serves more than 19 million people records in the cloud and delivers the person-centered UltiPro HCM solution. This solution provides the people record through the entire employee life cycle – talent acquisition through retirement.
Each year Ultimate holds a user event, held last week in Las Vegas, to highlight the continued direction of the company and share their unique approach to designing tools with the end-user in mind, not the HR or recruiting leader. This is a shift from what many competitors do. While it’s important to ensure the recruiting team, compensation analyst, or HR Director understands the functions and capabilities of the software, for Ultimate, the critical role is that of the employee or the manager. With a focus on simplicity in design and ability to use, Ultimate is able to add features without adding complexity.
Last year’s event included advancements in recruitment, payroll, onboarding and potential predictors. You can read about that here. This year, there was an air of change in the approach of sharing. While there are plenty of enhancements to the solution, as highlighted in the 2015 roadmap, there was also a common thread of expanding partnerships of all types. This thread ran throughout many of the discussions during the event. As my colleague Ben Eubanks shared in an earlier post, the big announcement was the new go-to-market partnership with NetSuite. I encourage you to read his post for more details.
So, what else is new for 2015? Ultimate Software has a fairly aggressive road map as you’ll see below. That said, Cecile Alper-Leroux and other leaders on the Ultimate Software team took time to explain how the heavy investment in R&D, $112 million in 2015, combined with the product development team’s people-centric approach, will bring solutions to market more quickly.
Other than having a clear message that leads to the overarching strategy, Ultimate focuses on having the right tool at the right time. This ability to leverage the right technology helps make the solution more flexible and future-proofs the data store. Additionally, Ultimate has approached micro-services differently from its competition. Instead of having a mobile approach, they keep the focus on person first. By doing this, they build solutions with experiences that give the customers choice. That means that the solutions can be used on very specific, personal devices as a consequence of focus on the person.
–Trish McFarlane, VP and Principal Human Resources Analyst, Brandon Hall Group
