We are attending Ultimate’s user conference UltiConnect at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. The conference kicked off with a welcome reception at Drais, a great location to get attendees to enjoy Las Vegas. And with over 2000 attendees and over 60% first time attendees the conference sees record attendance. 

 
 
So here are my Top 3 takeaways from the keynote:
  • People Centricity remains front and central for Ultimate – Ultimate has been stressing people centricity for a long time, and no surprise it was front and center at today’s keynote. CTO Adam Rogers walked us through the three main directions for Ultimate improving people / employee experience: 
    • Don’t waste people’s time – A good direction, see payroll innovation as key deliverable below. 
    • Build stronger leaders – Equally good – Ultimate will help leaders become more effective with the help of suggested actions.
    • Let HR focus on Strategy – Probably the best of all three – as the lack of strategic aspects is moving many HR leaders away from the executive table (and conversations). 
 
  • Innovation to Payroll with PayInsights – During the keynote Martin Hartshorne walked us through the importance of getting payroll right. As we have pointed out before – everything stops when the paycheck isn’t right. For the individual employee who is talking back to HR, and for all of HR and the enterprise when a large employee group is affected. Throughout the next 12 months Ultimate will work on capabilities to help employees to better understand their paychecks as well aid them to interact more efficiently with HR. 
 
  • Ease to do business – Software vendors often get set in their action and processes as they scale their operations, revisiting best practices is a good move and Rogers announced three new initiatives:
    • Tierless Support – Nobody wants to wait for the next level support agent to solve an issue, so it is good to see Ultimate eliminating the tiering of support representatives. This does not raise the experience of the support representatives so it will be interesting to see how Ultimate will solve that. 
    • Learning Center – Ultimate will offer new ways to understand its software, always a good move.
    • New online service experience – The fastest way to solve support is self-service, so it’s good to see that Ultimate is making it easier for customers to resolve support issues directly, and themselves. Customers love empowerment.
 

MyPOV

A good start for Connections, which is not only a customer conference, but also a customer appreciation and Ultimate is striking a good balance between the two. Focusing on people centricity, more specifically on employee experience is a good true north for any HR software vendor, and it is good to see Ultimate build more capabilities into that direction. Coupled with an improvement in know how transfer and customer support, Ultimate is doing the right things to become an even more attractive HCM vendor. Again a good start for the UltiConnect conference, stay tuned. 

More on Ultimate:
  • Event Report - Ultimate Software Connection - People first and an exciting roadmap ahead - read here
  • First Take - Ultimate Software UltiConnect Day #1 Keynote - read here
  • Event Report - Ultimate's UltiConnect - Off to a great start, but the road(map) is long - read here.
  • First Take – 3 Key Takeaways from Ultimate’s UltiConnect Conference Day 1 keynote – read here.
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here