This means that Generation Y will care” a lot more about career development and career path-ing than about any individual position,” Miller points out.

But such dynamics are putting talent management front and centre, he argues. “People are now widely talking about it,” Miller says. “You can read the Harvard Business Review any month and probably find articles about talent management. It’s in the business press all the time now.”

As a result, employers must now think about doing two key things. “Number one, you have to train more junior people to be able to handle more senior responsibility earlier in their career,” he warns. “You don’t have enough people to back-fill [with] those senior people retiring.

The second thing is to find ways to retain Generation Y employees, who will have a propensity to switch careers. “So you want them to be able to be developed and switch careers in their job rather than it leading to a move to another organisation,” Miller points out.

And luckily such dynamics play to Cornerstone’s core market, he believes. “As people start thinking more holistically about talent management, including the need to continuously develop employees, that plays really well into our strengths,” Miller claims.

 

As a result, he attests that the firm has “seen no slowdown in demand”, even though other companies are still talking about “macro-economic softness”.

 

Moreover, Miller says that the company has benefited from a fair bit of up-selling among its installed base too. Today, about 60% of its customers use the Performance Cloud performance management software, while more than 85% employ its Learning Cloud.

 

If its Recruiting Cloud is added to the mix, there would appear to be quite a lot of new business opportunities overall. Miller cites a Fortune 50 retailer as a prime example of this so-called ‘land and expand’ approach.

 

“The retailer started leveraging our Performance Cloud in 2009 for both performance and succession management,” he explains. “After nearly three successful years, they decided to purchase our Learning Cloud during the second quarter for all of its approximately 250,000 employees.”

But Cornerstone has also made a point of targeting both the relatively untapped small and medium business sector as well as the more mature enterprise space.

 

To this end, it acquired online peformance and talent management supplier, Sonar6, earlier this year, which sells its offerings to companies with less than 500 employees and has been rebranded as CSB (Cornerstone Small Business).

“It was our belief that, because of the ERP vendors’ focus on large enterprises, it was an ideal time for us to build a stronger business at the lower end of the market to take advantage of the enormous and relatively untapped market opportunity with SMBs,” Miller explains.

 

 

Rather than spending “significant efforts” in integrating its products with an ERP parents’ to make them part of a broader product offering, like many of its rivals, the vendor remains “singularly focused on providing organisations of all sizes” with a so-called “best-of-breed” system.

 
The best-of-breed moniker is one that Miller is keen to play up in the belief that the ‘one-stop-shop’ provided by ERP vendor is no longer appealing to customers.

 

As a result, Miller claims that Cornerstone is increasingly being invited to compete in bids by organisations that use Oracle and SAP as their ERP vendor and, in some instances, is even winning.

 

“A wide European consumer products company, which employs over 300,000 people worldwide, is a perfect example of such a deal,” Miller says. “This company has been a top SAP account for years and also a top success active account with performance management.”

 

When the customer first approached Cornerstone to discuss its Learning and Extended Enterprise Clouds, it had appeared to be a shoo-in for SAP and its SuccessFactors purchase.

But says Miller: “As we entered into discussions with them, nobody had realised that they weren’t concerned about what is the most convenient or cheapest option for them. They wanted the best solution for their organisation and they ultimately decided their best solution was Cornerstone.”

And he attests that the firm is seeing “more and more Oracle and SAP clients following a similar line of thinking”.

 

 

Moreover, Miller claims that Oracle has followed its typical path, which means that “Taleo has all but disappeared inside of Oracle and is now operating as just a sub-unit or I would say just functionally within Oracle.” As a result, it is “seeing them less often now”.

 

In contrast, SAP has maintained SuccessFactors as a separate business unit. But because of its forthcoming Ariba acquisition and decision to move its human capital management applications team into the SuccessFactors organisation, “you do have a lot of overlap of personnel, a lot of people with similar jobs being merged together”.

 

As a result, Miller believes that “there is some uncertainty about what’s going to happen next. There also obviously is a lot of integration work going on”.

This situation has given CornerStone a chance to enhance its system. Therefore, whereas six months ago, he thought that all of their products were “fairly similar” he now believes that there are big differences in terms of both software and service offerings.

For instance, over the next few months, the firm expects to add new functionality to its Recruiting Cloud, with the hope of making it “best-of-breed by the end of this year”.

 

“We believe this timing couldn’t be more perfect to adjust to the strong level of dissatisfaction currently being felt by clients of many of the traditional recruiting vendors,” Miller says.

Another big area of focus for the vendor is increasing its levels of social media support. “It’s really about social, making sure what we’re doing is user centric with social elements,” concludes Miller. “Not just social recruiting, but social performance, social learning and, of course, social collaboration and mobile.”