Mercer once had a benefits administration offering that they ended up selling to ADP. Then they partnered with SynHRgy (spelling?) to get into HRO. That didn’t pan out so well either. Towers Perrin has a partnership with Excellerate HRO (EDS) in the HRO space. Hewitt went full bore into HRO and that’s been a mixed bag of success and failure.
So when I read that Wyatt purchased WisdomNet, I was shaking my head. The official press release says that they got consulting services as well as software out of the deal. Let’s be honest – implementation services is not what Wyatt does, and any talent consulting that they got from WN is going to be fairly weak. I’d think that the intellectual property Wyatt already had was better than anything they acquired.
So really that leaves the software. Why would Wyatt buy WM for the software? As mentioned above, this would not be the first time that a consultancy purchased a vendor and got into a more traditional sales space, but it’s really not what consultancies do. Add that to the fact that it’s not one of the top tier vendors and you have more of a mystery.
It’s been argued that Wyatt has really been catering more towards the mid market where technology is in play. Sure they have plenty of large clients in the benefits and pension space, but technology hasn’t necessarily been a strong point for them. Perhaps the purchase of WN is their way of getting a new profit stream in this market segment. I’d compare it to the AON model – they seem to do a bit of everything in the 500-10K employee space.
I don’t know what’s going on here ,but it sure is strange to me.
4 responses to “Wyatt Gets into Talent Software”
Wyatt Gets into Talent Software Mercer once had a benefits administration offering that they ended up selling to ADP. Then they partnered with SynHRgy (spelling?) to get into HRO . That didn’t pan out so well either. Towers Perrin has a partnership with Excellerate … [
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