Cornerstone acquires Clustree. This was announced today.
One of my first customers at Otter Advisory was Clustree. I have been impressed with their deep technical understanding of ML/AI , and the pioneering work they do to gather, collate, classify and manage a vast repository of skills and competencies. I helped them tune up their positioning, and in full disclosure, I also advised them on the deal with Cornerstone. Thanks Bénédicte and Guillaume. I look forward to seeing the company do great things as part of Cornerstone.
So why did Cornerstone buy Clustree? Making machine learning actually useful for HR work is hard, far harder than most imagined it to be. People and jobs are complicated to classify meaningfully. It takes more than just a couple of smart data science people. Cornerstone is acquiring a proven solution, team and top notch customers, and a polished, refined dataset, and GDPR aware.
Paris is arguably the center of AI in Europe. Of all the US vendors, Cornerstone has done best at making Europe (Paris) a second home. It will provide critical mass from an engineering perspective, and Bénédicte will be an accomplished addition to the Cornerstone leadership team. The cultural fit will be good.
This is part of a broader trend. Workday has worked hard on its skills offering, and it is likely to be at the centre of its marketing and sales efforts in 2020, after several years in gestation. Degreed recently acquired Adepto. Josh covers that here. This is bigger than just matching people to training. The Netflix metaphor needs to be put to bed.
I recently met with Aneel, Workday CEO and co-founder, and it became crystal clear to me that over the next few years, data will play a far greater role in software selection and deployment that it does today. ( Josh Bersin has a report on the Workday skills cloud and Phil Wainewright’s post is v good too.) How vendors use data (your data, and aggregated other data) in a secure, compliant form, to actually deliver real insights and processes, will be what determines which vendors win or lose. Buyers of software will need to get a lot smarter about evaluating vendor data strategies. Today buyers evaluate transactions and processes, but it is time to start evaluating data, data curation, and data use. Over time data will move to centre of the value proposition. It will mean software will be assessed in very different ways that is today, vendor R&D will shift from just building processes and transactions to acquiring, curating, safeguarding, refining and utilizing data.
For instance, Microsoft has a massive opportunity with Linkedin, but it is yet to really figure that out. Other HR tech vendors will need to respond. Interesting times.
Happy to discuss further, drop me a note at thomasdototteratotteradvisorydotcom.
(Disclosure: I’ve attended Cornerstone Analyst days, and I follow them closely, but they aren’t a client).