New Partnerships Add New Hues to Competitive Landscape in HCM

The market space for human capital management (HCM) recently saw announcements of two partnerships, each involving top-tier cloud vendors. One of these announcements signals an apparent preference for breadth in talent management technology and places vendors of narrower solutions, however deep in functionality, at a disadvantage; the other poses potential competition to legacy providers and the perhaps best known native-to-the-cloud player. Together, these developments show that cloud vendors have innate flexibility that helps them to outmaneuver peers who lack the same or fail to exercise it.