In The Know v 1.45 HRDemo Roundup

Earlier this month, I hosted a new kind of conference in Las Vegas. The HRDemo Show features vendors demoing their software. It’s a new format for our industry and offered some significant insights into the state of the market and the differences between vendors.

• What Katherine Saw
  From Brian Sommer, one of the analysts at our Summit comes a set of observations from Katherine Jones who was also a part of the Analyst Summit.”Full-length live demos gave the audience a chance to compare the user interfaces of the talent management products shown, which varied from “busy” to cartoon-ish, from data-laden pages to clean and clear. In addition, the audience could ascertain performance differences as well. Some solutions took a long time to render metrics – too long for real-life use—while others (such as Workday) positively screamed as SaaS performers with impressive sub-second response times.”
• HR Demo Show and Keyser Soze
  “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. The same holds true for truly innovative HR (and all business) systems. If I have to click through a jabillion login systems, remember 40 passwords and learn to navigate an unfriendly UI that’s based on a legacy system, I’m not only likely to believe your SaaS exists, but hate it.”
• A New Model In HR Conferences: HR Demo Show
  Sarah White is an aspiring tech analysts who focuses on making the complex extremely simple and intelligible. “Most conferences are built around 2 spaces – the conference/learning area and the expo hall. Attendees arrive at the show typically with a focus on one of these areas and the other is more secondary. The traditional sessions are about adoption, use, what other companies are doing (All important!) and the expo space is where you pick up pens and swag as you get attacked/approached by vendors looking to have you see 3-4 minutes of their software. HR Demo Show decided to combine & refine that model and make it all about the technology.”
• The Truly Night and Workday
  Kevin Grossman’s recap notes that SuccessFactors and Workday make an non-glamorous thing like HRTech glamorous.
• The best Companies in HR are …
  Willing to take risks and make investments. You can see it in their demos and their interfaces.
  
• Tektonic Award Winners:
  SharedXpertise, the producers of the HR Demo Show announced the winners of this year’s Tektonic Awards. The winners were determined by a rigorous process that included a written customer feedback survey, industry analyst and independent third-party evaluations and a review of each vendor’s software functionality. Here are the awards:

  Overall – Workday
  Talent Management/Recruiting – Job Search Television Network
  Performance Management – SuccessFactors
  Compensation/Payroll/Benefits – Ultimate Software
  Learning – Saba HR
  Social Media – Monster.com
  Vendor Management Solutions – Beeline
  Workforce Management – Lawson
  Workforce Planning – Aruspex
  HRMS – NorthgateArinso
  

• TweetReach For the HRDemo Show
  The BlogSquad generated over 3.6 million social media impressions during the event.