Octopus HR, the web-based HR software provider, won its second small business HR software prize at the Software Satisfaction Awards last night, and beat Enterprise HR winner Cascade HR to the web-hosted HR prize.
Octopus overcame Select HR in the SME category, while Cascade beat SnowdropKCS HR to the big company prize, confirming the dominance of online ‘Cloud’ applications in this year’s awards.
More than 8,000 members of HRzone, Trainingzone and associate online communities in the Sift Media portfolio took part in the online survey that underpins the awards. These user ratings for ease of use, reliability, functionality and value for money make up a compound score that is used to assess the awards.
The iCIMS Talent Platform won the award for Talent Management, a category that did not attract a massive response this year, confirming Josh Bersin’s theory that rather than stimulating interest in talent management, the recession has triggered a short term slump. The web-based 360-degree appraisal system Carbon360 was the other shortlisted supplier in this category.
In the Learning software category, the Corporate Language Training training package won the award ahead of Atlantic Link’s Content Point authoring system and Harbiner’s Raptivity.
Software companies and commentators continue to emphasise the need for strategic learning that aligns itself to corporate goals. Let’s hope we’ve seen the worst of the talent management slump and that more trainers and HR managers will look at and implement integrated tools in the next year. Then we might see a more competitive HR and Learning race card in 2010’s awards.
Elsewhere, users gave three of the four CRM awards to software as a service market leader Salesforce.com, which was also named Software Vendor of the Year. Full details of the survey results and 20+ awards are available from the Software Satisfaction Awards website.
