systematicHR

Who’s paying attention?  Did the value of HRO deals go down in 2006?  Sure, there were much fewer $1B deals, but what was the cause of that?  Were there overall fewer deals as well?

I’m thinking that deals are starting to move into the mid market and we’re seeing less of the multi-line multi-process deals that make for huge sales dollars.  Along with that, we’re getting some price compression based on the competitors needing to be competitive (what a thought!!!).  What’s bad news for the vendors is that clients are starting to go back to them asking for price concessions.  HRO vendors are mostly still not profitable, or the losses are hidden in the revenues of larger lines of business.  At any rate, here are my highlights:

• Go big:  One must talk about Unilever.  The largest deal of the year, this deal covers most of HR.
• ADP does global:  ADP’s deal with Ikea in 40 countries is interesting.  Using their new SAP platform, they have a chance to pull this off.  We’ll see if they can execute.
• Hewitt all over the place:  While not featured prominently on this list, Hewitt was the usual market mover.  With their public facing problems around implementation bandwidth, issues at the executive level, and overall profitability, clients didn’t seem as scared off as I thought they would be.  Perhaps Hewitt is still able to generate confidence and clients are not as worried about market consolidation as I thought.
• Excellerate’s first:  Excellerate had their first major deal (only deal?) with Cardinal Health.  They’ll need to win a couple more this year to remain viable.
• Where’s the rest?:  What happened to ACS, Fidelity and Convergys?