The buying spree that private equity firms have been on over the last few years continues with Ceridian being the latest one to hit the HR market space.

Ceridian to be acquired for $5.3 billion in cash

Private equity shop THL Partners and title insurance outfit Fidelity National Financial will divvy up company.

CNNMoney, 30 May 2007

This move underscores the significant change that’s happening in HR technology — specifically the movement to Web 2.0, SOA, and SaaS architectures that’s been spurred on by vendors such as Salesforce.com and Dave Duffield’s new Workday. Ceridian suffers from a large client base on aging technology, making it virtually impossible for them to innovate and re-build their systems without significant disruption to their current clients. Yet it’s clear that they have to upgrade their technology if they want to remain a player in the market. Going private takes them out of the public eye, away from Wall Street’s pressures of quarter-on-quarter earnings, and allows them to make the investments they need to upgrade their technology.

“Private equity firms buy companies with mostly borrowed money, take them out of the public spotlight and retool them with the aim of selling them for a profit later.” CNNMoney.com May 15, 2007

Ceridian users should be excited by the opportunity this could bring!

What do you think? What are you doing about SOA and SaaS?

Vurv’s announcement about their acquisition of PBN for offboarding and workforce analytics underscores for me the movement of the industry toward integrated, embedded analytics:

“Vurv will also incorporate PBN’s unique workforce analytics solution to provide real-time monitoring of key performance measures, in dashboard format, which enables senior executives and HR leaders to track financial, compliance and workforce metrics and provide an integrated and holistic view of the entire employee lifecycle from recruiting to separation.”

Read the full press release.

The days of reporting databases, data marts, and data warehouses are numbered. Organizations need real-time information presented in an usable approach that line managers can understand and take action on in carrying out the activities of their day-to-day jobs. Analytics must be integrated and comprehensive across all business functions, from planning and budgeting to requisitioning and recruiting to onboarding, complete life-cycle management and offboarding. They must incorporate planning, financial, compliance, benchmark, and best-practice information to be useful. And, they must be presented in a visual, dashboard-like manner with configurable graphics and drill-down capabilities so that users can tailor the information making it truly usable based on their own individual needs.
Congrats to Vurv for demonstrating their leadership in embedded workforce analytics!