It is losing money and market share, but that doesn’t count for much anymore. Taleo just sold itself for a cool $1.9 billion to Oracle. Some things need to be said about this.
Suggestion for the developers: call your headhunter. There are a lot of great companies out there including mine that are looking to build great things, and they won’t be asking you to mate a fish with a bird.
First, to the Taleo management team, I congratulate you. I would have never pursued and wouldn’t have succeeded at doing what you did. In fact, for those of us with private software companies and for whom making a profit is the sine qua non of our existence, what you’ve done looks like magic.
Second, to the software developers who are left to clean up this mess of platforms that mergers inevitably bring on, I feel sorry for you.
Suggestion: call your headhunter. There are a lot of great companies out there looking to build great things, and they won’t be asking you to mate a fish with a bird.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t understand: why would Oracle buy Taleo when they have PeopleSoft? Or is their strategy to buy existing systems over building new ones? Are Taleo and PeopleSoft different enough from each other to not compete in the same space?
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dunno…the usual take is to acquire the customers or the talent (employees).
If it’s for the talent, well Taleo has 1100+ employees which translates into $2+ million headhunting fee for each hire. Nice business when you can get it.
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They are trying to get into the SaaS market and Taleo was the largest in that space for recruiting.
They must have been losing folks to Taleo.
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Weird to see our friends over at ERE incorrectly reporting that Taleo has been profitable. Clearly not the case. http://www.ere.net/2012/02/09/taleo-becomes-latest-hr-vendor-to-be-sold/
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Neither SAP or Oracle has a clue about talent leadership and they don’t have any software to support it either.
Interesting reading
http://humancapitalist.com/?p=785
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Hi Arja…agreed that the post by Jason you’ve hyperlinked is a good read. talent technology evolves ever so rapidly…no one product can stay on top for long.
But your statement that ‘neither sap or oracle has a clue’ sounds more like frustration than reality. those companies move slower because they’re bigger, and their solutions solve harder problems. they help big organization execute better.
how is that not talent leadership?
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Oracle gets rid of competition. Oracle doesn’t need to make a big profit ; the srategy is simply to cut costs (sack the developers) and keep the 35% profit margin, whatever.
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Well what package Oracle will give to Taleo employees
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