A 2nd look at the HCM Gartner MQ

Posted on Updated on

Towards the tail end of last year the release of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises caused a lot of excitement. For a number of years Oracle had been positioned behind Workday by Gartner in their Magic Quadrant graph. In 2018 they were approximately level, and then in 2019 – for the first time – Gartner positioned Oracle HCM Cloud as ahead (in that it was the furthest up and to the right on the Quadrant).

This was obviously celebrated by much delighted posting on LinkedIn and Twitter with screenshots of the Magic Quadrant graph itself, and with good reason as it’s a positive message:

With all the delight at now being ‘ahead’ on the quadrant graph itself, I feel that some of the other messages in the narrative of Gartner’s report were missed (and – although there are naysayers about its rankings – it is a very comprehensive report).

The full report is well worth a read, however I’m going to pull out a few of Gartner’s comments that I think are the highlights:

Having closed all major gaps in product breadth, Oracle has more recently focused on innovation in UX, enhancing newer modules, as well as deepening support of hourly workforces. … The product is well suited to MNCs that want a global SOR for core HR and talent processes. During the past few years, Oracle has exhibited a sustained commitment to expanding and deepening its HCM applications.

Strengths

Oracle HCM Cloud’s overall customer reference satisfaction with application functionality is well above average for this Magic Quadrant.

Oracle is one of only two vendors included in this research offering feature-rich platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities. Oracle scored well above average for mobile support, incorporation of emerging advanced technologies and integration of HCM suite with other applications.

Oracle has demonstrated vision and innovation by adding an Experience Design Studio, as well as expanding the use of digital assistants, mobile responsive design and alternative UX.

Cautions

Here, Gartner commented on configuration limitations (and mentions that Experience Design Studio will aide here, but at the time was not fully rolled out). They also mentioned that reference customers are harder to locate outside of North America, UK, India and APAC.

Summary

In summary, it looks like Oracle was adjudged to be in a great position. There were plenty of strong positives and they weren’t called out for any cautions that are as glaring as the competition:

  • SAP – “challenges associated with disparate acquired architectures, such as complex implementations, release absorption and reporting”
  • Workday – “has application functionality gaps relative to its competitors” and “customer satisfaction with the value of the product for the money spent is well below average”

It feels a little like commenting on a school pupil’s report card, but Oracle HCM Cloud has made some large strides forward during the year and this progression is reflected in the results attained.

Advertisement

This entry was posted in Competitors, Strategy.