Vendor Analysis
published on Sep 02, 2025
Report Overview:
This vendor assessment analyzes Cornerstone's offerings and capabilities in HCM Technology & GenAI
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s HCM Technology profile on Cornerstone is a comprehensive assessment of Cornerstone’s offerings and capabilities, designed for:
- Sourcing managers monitoring the capabilities of existing suppliers of HCM Technology and identifying vendor suitability for HCM Technology RFPs
- Vendor marketing, sales, and business managers looking to benchmark themselves against their peers
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the HCM Technology sector.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of Cornerstone’s HCM Technology offerings, capabilities, and market and financial strengths, including:
- Identification of the company’s strategy, emphasis, and new developments
- Analysis of the company’s strengths, challenges, and outlook
- Revenue estimates
- Analysis of the profile of the company’s customer base, including the company’s targeting strategy and examples of current contracts
- Analysis of the company’s offerings and key service components
- Analysis of the company’s delivery organization, including the location of delivery centers.
Key Findings & Highlights:
Cornerstone, headquartered in California, is a global “workforce agility” and talent intelligence platform provider, offering cloud-based talent management and learning solutions delivered through its Cornerstone Galaxy platform. It addresses the full employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding to learning, performance management, succession planning, and analytics.
Cornerstone was formed in 1999 under the name CyberU and operated as a provider of online corporate training and education. Its offering evolved in response to client and market demand, pivoting toward talent management and learning solutions.
In April 2020, Cornerstone acquired Saba Software, Inc., a learning management and talent experience platform provider. At acquisition, the combined company represented ~$800m in revenues and supported ~6k clients and ~75m users globally.
Although Cornerstone has primarily developed its technology organically, it has accelerated its innovation through select acquisitions over the years; recent notable examples include:
- Skyhive (2024): AI-powered skills intelligence
- Talespin (2024): immersive learning and AI-powered simulations
- Saba Software (2020): learning and talent experience technology
- Clustree (2020): AI-enabled skills platform
- Grovo (2018): micro-learning and learning content
- Evolv (2014): machine learning and data science platform.
In August 2021, Cornerstone agreed to be acquired by private equity firm Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. The deal valued Cornerstone at $5.2bn and was completed in October 2021.
Currently, Cornerstone has ~7k clients and ~140m users across 186 countries. It supports multi-language, multi-industry deployments.
