We had the opportunity to attend Cornerstone’s yearly user conference, Convergence in Los Angeles, taking place from May 12th-14th 2015. The conference is well attended with over 1500 attendees, a good growth from the 1300 in San Diego last year.
People Potential addressed with Learning – In the morning keynote Cornerstone CEO Adam Miller spend a good time talking about People Management that he sees as being all about managing potential. And true to its roots as a Learning vendor, Cornerstone sees Learning as a key component for people to achieve their potential. The premise is of course compelling, but from our research the potential definition seemed limited to a classic, vertical career potential, with no mention of lateral and horizontal potential. But it is good to see that Cornerstone is innovating around its core, Learning again. The ability to self-create and publish content, while still being screened and vetted on appropriateness is a key capability that Cornerstone demoed.
It was also good to see how Cornerstone has completed the complete Talent Management functionality from Recruiting all the way to Compensation Management. Overall a good keynote, with great customer brands on stage (Nestle and Louis Vuitton) and a good approach to bring both PaaS and Analytics (see below) to an audience mainly composed of HR professionals.
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| Miller with Next Generation [Learning] Content |
Analytics on the roadmap – Leveraging internal previous work and assets from the Evolv acquisition (more here), Cornerstone has launched its analytics offering, called Insights (seems to be a popular name these for analytical offerings). In the keynote Cornerstone oscillated between dashboards and ‘true’ analytics a few times. That should not be a surprise as reporting was a critical aspect for its customers before, so if Cornerstone can address both issues it is certainly a good move (see the press release here). The good news was that in the keynote the example areas of analytics were all ‘true’ analytics (my definition here), which in my view are analytics that refer to either actions or recommendations for a business user.
From the little we learnt about the architecture, it looks like Cornerstone has done the right moves, putting data into Hadoop clusters and then running machine learning models on top of it. Doing model thrashing, i.e. running n models and choosing the ones with the best analytical value is equally the right approach vs. a traditional singular model approach. Now it comes back, like with all other analytical offerings by all vendors in the space, to show that the models ‘really work’ and make a difference when applied across the variety of customers with very different data landscapes. But for now a good move by Cornerstone, the land grab in Analytics is on – it will be interesting to see the first customer use cases and success stories.
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| 7 Analytics Use Cases presented by Cornerstone |
But the crown jewels of CornerstoneEdge are certainly the AppBuilder functionality that allows users to create new applications easily. Remarkably these users can be both developers and (sufficiently tech savvy) end users. Cornerstone has developed its own programming language, called Shelby. The motivation for that was to create an easy to use, end user friendly language. Cornerstone shared that it is object oriented, and the need to build Shelby was largely created by the lack of end user friendly programming languages on the market.
And finally Cornerstone allows the publication of the new built applications on the market place. CornerstoneEdge is supposed to roll out through the 2nd half of 2015, with general availability being planned by early 2016.
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| Corsello with 3 PaaS use cases |
MyPOV
Another good user conference for Cornerstone. The vendor is growing and with all the positive dynamics are experienced by the attendees like overall growth, new functionality and customer adoption. And the new venue at the JW Marriott in downtown LA was certainly a good move, too.On the positive side it is good to see that Cornerstone is innovating in key areas around the core offering with Analytics and a PaaS, both critical moves in our view to offer the next level of best practices for HCM. Both also help to foster a vibrant eco system. It was also good to see that Cornerstone is innovating ‘back at the roots’ with its Learning module. On the business side this was the first analyst meeting where the assembled analysts did not give Cornerstone CEO Miller a hard time for strategic direction beyond Talent Management, which basically means that Cornerstone has reached a status quo in the Talent Management space. The vendors ambition to reach 1B US$ revenue seems plausible.
On the concern side the choice of a proprietary programming language with Shelby will not woo developers, but that's ok. Cornerstone is not going after the all-purpose PaaS market, but the extension of its ecosystem and customization market. There success of CornerstoneEdge will live and die by the capabilities that enable and end user to develop (ideally) with no coding. The user interface needs improvement, there has been little innovation in the last 12 months or so and with the acceleration of UI best practices, a timeout of 2-3 quarters is the equivalent of 2-3 years not so long ago. The good news is that customers seem not (yet) to be concerned, but Cornerstone should take action soon and decisively.
Finally we did not have a chance to have the usual high level glimpse behind the curtain with Mark Goldin – so ‘flying blind’ on that aspect makes us neutral in this direction. A lot has happened in cloud infrastructure best practices, so we hope to catch up on that soon.
But overall congrats to Cornerstone to a good event, it’s still on for another two days, so stay tuned.
And finally a collection of notes aka tweets from the conference: