Last week Jason Corsello noted that Kronos was being acquired by a private equity firm. I honestly didn’t take too much notice of it, but echoed his thoughts wondering why an ADP didn’t move first. ADP has had a very long relationship with Kronos, and if anyone was going to take them, I thought ADP would move first. What I concluded was that ADP probably didn’t want all the market baggage that includes the other Kronos HRMS products. Still, since probably 90% of the ADP time management cluent base is on a Kronos product, it’s a bit risky to let Kronos get acquired by anyone else.
Then comes today. What is probably a complete coincidence, Workbrain also agrees to be acquired by Infor. Workbrain has been one of my favorite time and attendance applications for a whilte – similar to Success Factors for talent management or Virtual Edge for recruiting, Workbrain also seems to be a newer web 2.0 type company without the baggage of old legacy code. This meant that they didn’t have to provide workarounds, but could simply start a new application from scratch using good technology from the beginning. Workbrain really only provides time management solutions, so unlike Kronos, they are less diversified which should have been attractive to another vendor (like ADP or as Jason says Oracle). They also have a decent market penetration into the Fortune 1000.
I honestly can’t see much of anything going on here, but one does have to scratch one’s head when a couple of the top vendors announce they will be acquired within days of each other.
4 responses to “Upheaval in Time Management”
Upheaval in Time Management Last week Jason Corsello noted that Kronos was being acquired by a private equity firm. I honestly didn’t take too much notice of it, but echoed his thoughts wondering why an ADP didn’t move first. ADP has had a very long relationship … [
Kronos really needs to be out of the spotlight to develop their next generation of code (not to mention overall architecture and underlying domain models), expand their footprint geographically, and figure out how to deliver a much broader functional footprint. Note their announcement today of a partnership with Meta4, which will help them address all three of these challenges. So no surprise there on why they needed to go private or why ADP might not have wanted to acquire them (so noted that their ADP relationship is heavily in the US). Just some thoughts. Naomi
After having worked as an IC for more than 15 years with PeopleSoft, Kronos and ADP implementations, what I have learned about ADP is that sometimes you just have to listen to what is not being said and see what is not being made visible to discover their reasoning. It may take a while but eventually the reason always surfaces – it always does…
Working for a competitor of Kronos, TimeCentre, it was a little surprising that they went private. Kronos has a bad image in the time management industry that maybe this is a good move. Going back to being private means less people to answer to without all of the investors. There is a lot of consolidation happening in the time management industry along with companies expanding their offerings.