“Mostly still under the radar.” That’s how Workterra was described in the recently published 2015 Human Capital Management (HCM) for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) Vendor Brandscape Report ™ from The Starr Conspiracy Intelligence Unit.
Well, “under the radar” is OK with us — for now. Especially when you consider that we were being compared against some of most well-established brands in the space (including ADP, Workday, Kronos, and Oracle), and if you bear in mind three key points from the independently researched report:
1. In the same breath that the report describes Workterra as “mostly still under the radar,” it says we have “incredibly high potential.”
2. The HCM market for SMB is a staggering $95.3 billion (so it’s a huge area to be targeting and gaining attention from).
3. Workterra was among the 24 HCM solutions for SMB that met the researchers’ parameters for inclusion in the study (these were the vendor’s presence and brand position in the North American SMB HCM market; TSCIU’s ability to measure the vendor’s brand awareness independently via its ongoing research; and the vendor’s participation in TSCIU’s briefing and research process).
“We continue to examine various market segments to make forward-looking predictions about how brands will perform in the coming year, with this Brandscape focusing on HCM brands for SMBs,” wrote Steve Smith, a partner at The Starr Conspiracy and chief of the Intelligence Unit, the agency’s research and publishing arm.
So, what gives Workterra its “incredibly high potential”? According to the Brandscape, it’s this: “The killer differentiation for Workterra is the flexibility of the platform. It’s easy for account people to make configuration changes in minutes and roll them out in real time — changes that would require a help ticket and days or even weeks of waiting on other platforms.” As TSCIU’s report says in its overview of Workterra, we’ve approached HCM from the benefits angle rather than through HRMS. We’ve added exchange, wellness, recruiting, and onboarding to our 100 percent organic platform. In other words, features, functions, and a slick interface have become table stakes for HCM vendors. We believe that changing the game of HCM going forward requires a unified architecture that can efficiently handle multiple apps and a variety of menu structures.
Speaking of forward-looking, the Brandscape concludes that Workterra is among only seven of the researched vendors that has a “clear and compelling message” going into 2016.
We believe the reason for our “clear and compelling message” to the SMB market is obvious if you accept the report’s viewpoint that technology has “completely changed the game for HCM in the small to midsize employer market.” That’s the result of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) combined with the wide availability of high-speed Internet connections and mobile devices. That combination means SMBs will have the power to “automate, outsource, manage, and accelerate business processes in a way that was formerly the exclusive domain of large enterprises, especially when it comes to people processes,” the report says.
Again, we couldn’t agree more. In fact, it’s exactly what Workterra is staking its future on. As we wrote in our e-book “Transforming HCM: Starting Right Now”:
“In a world of increasingly complex financial models, ever-more confusing regulatory demands, and a multigenerational, highly mobile workforce, the future of human capital management (HCM) is wide open. ... Workterra sees a world in which any company that wants a SaaS-delivered, affordable, and complete HCM solution can have one. We know it won’t happen overnight. But it’s close — very close.”