In the early hours before its yearly user conference Convergence in downtown Los Angeles, Cornerstone made an important announcement on its product capability, announcing a PaaS.
So let’s dissect the press release in our customary style – it can be found here:
SANTA MONICA, Calif., May 12, 2015 – Cornerstone OnDemand (NASDAQ: CSOD), a global leader in cloud-based talent management software solutions, today announced the launch of Cornerstone Edge, a new cloud computing architecture and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that provides clients, partners and third-party developers with new, easy-to-use tools and services for quickly creating and deploying new and existing applications within the Cornerstone suite of applications.
MyPOV – HR Professionals keep mentioning ‘integration’ as one of the key problems and concerns that are on their minds. A part of the problem is that enterprises need to integrate solutions that are built on separate platforms and enterprises need to integrate them. With the advent of modern platforms, vendors with enough ecosystem power can attract third parties to their platforms and create a platform integrated offering. Moreover, a PaaS will give enterprises the opportunities to customize their HCM solution further, without breaking their capability to consume regular upgrades.
Companies today require the flexibility to build applications specific to their particular needs. Cornerstone Edge enables clients to extend their investment in Cornerstone and fit their unique necessities by allowing the creation of web and mobile applications that leverage talent management data, drastically lowering the cost and complexity of application development and management.
MyPOV – Good to see Cornerstone hit the standard PaaS messages. Especially in the mobile field we see the high desire and demand to build enterprise specific applications – or to significantly expand vendor offered one.
The platform is designed to meet the complex needs of developers and simple demands of power users. Streamlining the app development process, Cornerstone Edge rapidly integrates with Cornerstone’s cloud applications, shifts specific aspects of systems management to Cornerstone, the service provider, and provides tools to build an application.
Available for preview in July, Cornerstone Edge enables users to:
? Learn. With Cornerstone Developer, users can leverage Cornerstone’s developer community to learn and access key resources for Cornerstone Edge.
? Integrate. Cornerstone API Services provide access to Cornerstone’s library of APIs and services, built on the OData framework, as well as documentation, sample entities and tutorials.
? Build. Using Cornerstone App Builder, clients and partners can create applications using Cornerstone APIs, drag-and-drop development tools and Cornerstone’s proprietary Shelby programming language.
? Market. The Cornerstone Marketplace helps clients to easily access and configure third-party applications that are integrated with or built on Cornerstone Edge.
MyPOV – These four capabilities that are key to the success of PaaS. Naturally Build and Integrate are inherent capabilities, but it is good to see that Learn and Market are equally part of it (Cornerstone launched its Marketplace at Convergence a year ago – read more here).
Cornerstone’s independent software vendors (ISVs) now have access to the tools and resources they need for easily building integrations with Cornerstone and embedding functionality directly within the Cornerstone suite of applications. Cornerstone has more than 25 ISV applications and integrations available in the Cornerstone Marketplace, including applications for background screening, tuition reimbursement, content management and continuous professional development.
MyPOV – It’s a good start for Cornerstone, but it will have to accelerate ISV, partner and developer uptake.
Comments on the News
“Over the last 15 years, we have been singularly focused on building the most robust, organically built talent management suite in the industry. While our mission to help people realize their potential has not changed, we believe what clients want and need out of talent management solutions is changing. Cornerstone clients don’t just want robust application functionality to manage their people. They are increasingly demanding more flexibility and extensibility of their investments,” said Adam Miller, founder and CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand. “With the launch of the Cornerstone Edge platform, we now have the unmatched ability to deliver development tools and services that put the power of cloud computing in the hands of our clients.”
MyPOV – Well said by Adam Miller, and a logical step for Cornerstone. After completing the coverage of the full Talent Management scope last year, announcing a marketplace a year ago, the next logical step is a PaaS.
“The future success of enterprise application vendors will be dependent on the ecosystem they create, and by transforming an application into a platform based on powerful data is the best way to rally customers, solution providers and developers to drive innovation in an industry,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Until now, the HCM space has not benefitted from PaaS technology, and, as with all platforms, having first-mover advantage is important to set the standards and encourage usage.”
MyPOV – Mueller after Miller, wait Mueller who? It’s early days for PaaS in HCM, and Cornerstone has hit a first for the Talent Management space, well done.
“What makes Cornerstone and Cornerstone Edge distinct is our reach,” commented Jason Corsello, vice president of corporate strategy for Cornerstone OnDemand. “While many of our SaaS peers deploy their solutions to specific teams within an organization, we deploy to every employee at nearly every company we work with, which makes our platform opportunity unique and potentially game-changing.”
MyPOV – Fair enough from Corsello to see broader reach by Cornerstone than other vendors. What is clear is that a successful Marketplace and Paas product will do that for Cornerstone.
Overall MyPOV
The age of end user enablement is coming quickly, also to the HCM space. PaaS is the first step towards it, allowing (savvy) enterprise users to select from a larger ecosystem of solutions, that ideally can be taken live with no substantial implementation effort. An earlier effort in the PaaS space was done by Oracle at OpenWorld 2014 (here is the HCM take), but that was an overall push for PaaS across its SaaS portfolio. Cornerstone has the chance to tune its SaaS offering to HCM needs and more specifically even Talent Management needs. So congrats to Cornerstone to be early with that trend, now it needs to accelerate uptake and usage of the PaaS, which will be available in July this year.
