Vendor Analysis
published on Jul 03, 2019
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall assessment analyzes Cornerstone OnDemand's offerings and capabilities in Next Generation HCM Technology.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s HCM Technology Vendor Assessment for Cornerstone OnDemand is a comprehensive assessment of Cornerstone OnDemand’s HCM platform offering 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 HR Technology sector
- HR and payroll decision makers.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of Cornerstone OnDemand’s Next Generation HCM Technology offering, capabilities, and market and financial strength, including:
- Identification of the company’s strategy, emphasis, and new developments
- Analysis of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, 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 locations.
Key Findings & Highlights:
Cornerstone OnDemand ('Cornerstone' or 'CSOD') is a cloud-based talent management, and human capital management software provider based in Santa Monica, California.
CSOD was formed in 1999 under the name CyberU and operated as a provider of online corporate training and education. Through client and market demand, it's offering evolved and it pivoted toward talent management and learning solutions.
CSOD has a history of innovation in the talent management space, including launching its SaaS-based talent management platform in 2001, followed by integrated talent management in 2005. It introduced social networking in its talent management suite in 2008, and prescriptive talent analytics in 2014.
In March 2011, Cornerstone OnDemand launched in IPO and began trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker CSOD.
In 2017, CSOD announced that it had received a $300m investment from Silver Lake and LinkedIn (a Microsoft company) to help expand and revise its capital structure, as well as to support a strategic partnership for learning content from LinkedIn.
Although Cornerstone has primarily developed its platform organically, it has made select acquisitions to boost its capability.
As of June 2019, CSOD supported >3.5k clients, serving ~42m users in 192 countries, with 43 languages, and supported by 21 offices globally.
CSOD's HCM platform is entirely cloud-based with a single database architecture and is offered as a multi-tenant solution.
CSOD offers a modular approach, so there are no forced modules required for startup; clients can pick and implement any combination to fit their unique needs. Its HCM offering is focused on the transformational elements of HR vs. transactional, and therefore, purposely lacks native payroll and benefits modules.
CSOD offers four modules within its HCM suite, including the following high-level features; all modules are mobile-enabled with self-service capability, built-in workflow, automation, and embedded prescriptive and predictive analytics across modules, and are capable of supporting 43 languages:
- Recruiting
- Performance
- Learning
- HR.
CSOD positions itself as a "talent-driven HCM provider," and therefore focuses its solution on the transformational vs. transactional elements of HR. The Cornerstone platform can also act as a flexible wrapper or connector to consolidate systems globally, and to connect it to CSOD's various modules based on client needs.
Its offering is globally focused, and although it has historically been targeted to the middle and large enterprise client, however, it is increasingly targeting clients below 1k.