I’m home from seven weeks on the road and boy, has it been a busy few days catching up. Lots of interesting pairings and partnerings crossing my desk recently, so let’s plow, shall we? (Name the movie and you will win my lifelong adulation.)

June 4 – iCIMS and Ultimate Software announce new alliance. This is potentially big news. Both are established yet innovative players in their respective field. And both have seen the value of partnering with expertise outside their domain versus trying to build everything themselves. iCIMS was one of the companies featured in our 2017 Talent Acquisition Index Report that provided the full trifecta of recruitment marketing, applicant tracking, and onboarding. Similarly, Ultimate Software was one of the organizations in the 2018 Payroll Systems Index Report, highlighted for its payroll capabilities as well as its innovation around AI. Combining their respective strengths across talent acquisition, talent management, and workforce management/payroll, with the added benefit of the predictive analytics and AI capabilities, keep your eyes peeled for what this duo brings next.

June 4 – Boeing looks to Degreed as part of a $100 million investment in education. This is what the future of learning will look like. Boeing has long been at the forefront of workforce planning – I remember a conference probably 10 years ago where they said they knew how many kindergartners needed to know that an engineer wasn’t just someone who drove a train in order to deliver one engineer to their workforce. Their new effort combines crowdsourcing of topics, content from Degreed.com, and a $6 million investment in technology education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Further investments will be named later, but this employer/employee/provider/education joint effort is sure to be a model worthy of study.

June 8 – Workday acquires Rallyteam. Rallyteam, an innovative solution focused on matching skills to work, and internal mobility was founded in 2013. This is a great piece of functionality not currently well represented in Workday’s solution. In a blog post about the acquisition, Workday highlights the impressive team that they are getting with this acquisition – many of whom came from Cornerstone OnDemand. And in fact, Cornerstone led Rallyteam’s venture round in 2015 and invested in its series A in 2017. The acquisition price was not disclosed.

June 10 – Workday acquires Adaptive Insights. The acquisition price was loud and clear on Workday’s next acquisition just two days later, paying approximately $1.55 billion for Adaptive Insights. Adaptive Insights’ Enterprise Performance Management solution was already in use by approximately 10% of the Workday user base. Workday plans to focus its current Workday Planning product on workforce planning. This will certainly be space for the HCM community to watch closely.

June 13 – Alight expands “health navigation services”. Alight, the Aon spinoff that encompasses HR and financial cloud deployment and application management services, as well as health and financial well-being services, acquired Compass Professional Health Solutions. Compass brings a high touch but technology enabled employee experience to help individuals navigate the complex benefit environment. By offering application management and this experience layer, populated with content from organizations like compass, Alight is offering a new way for organizations to think about delivering their HR and benefits capabilities.

The activity continues as the year chugs on, with partnerships, acquisitions, and new combinations of technology and service capability we never imagined. With the fall conference season just around the corner, we will continue to keep our ear to the ground for all the next news. Until then…