Saba Summit In Three Words: Talent, Cloud, Predictive

At the Saba @Work Summit held in Orlando’s Royal Pacific Resort hotel, there was an energetic group of customers eager to learn about all the new Saba developments. The Saba Cloud Talent Management suite with the new Recruiting@Work and The Intelligent Mentor (TIM) took center stage. It was evident though, that “Cloud” weighed heavily on the minds of all customers.  It presented itself as a major decision point. We’ll discuss why.

Saba Cloud

The major thrust at the summit was Saba Cloud and the modules that would be included. A major spotlight was placed on Saba’s intelligent cloud solutions for Talent Management. Key focus was on new innovative solutions such as TIM (The Intelligent Mentor), which uses machine learning to provide predictive recommendations throughout the cloud suite and the new Recruiting@Work module in Saba Cloud.

Saba – Predictive Applications

We believe the future is predictive business applications.  The Intelligent Mentor (TIM), will have to be trained to be truly effective. TIM denotes a trend towards predictiveness and getting actionable insights from intelligence. It’s taking big data and breaking it down into relevant bits of little data that can take enterprise users from insights to action. Smarter applications that can recognize human or machine patterns and make recommendations in context will become a business requirement. Doing this around a Talent Management suite as Saba is brings this to where it matters, enabling people in the workplace to make real-time decisions.

Saba – Recruiting@Work

Recruiting@Work supports collaborative and predictive hiring capabilities.  This recent addition shows Saba rounding out its cloud Talent Management suite by adding adjacent capabilities. Saba has been known mostly for its learning solutions over the past several years. In speaking with customers at the summit who utilize the learning solution, the Saba Cloud suite modules such as Recruiting@Work, was of great interest.

Our recommendation from a messaging perspective would be to cast each module in the Saba Cloud platform as part of the continuum of people’s work lives. Each module should be viewed as a seamless component that weaves into others depending on the work people are doing.

In all the talk about Saba Cloud, we noticed social was not mentioned or called out much. Now, I will be the first to declare there is a high level of social fatigue syndrome in this industry, but surprising that Saba didn’t speak much about its social capabilities. However, there was a strong message about enabling the workforce and individual users.

Saba Cloud Migrations

Most customers and attendees I spoke with at the Summit were thinking about migrations to the cloud and what issues they would face in doing so. Some customers were not on the latest version of the enterprise offering and so had serious questions as to what migrating would entail. Attendees came to the summit with a clear mandate to understand their options.

The positives for Saba will be that the cloud will allow them to be agile with regards to software releases and updates. Clearly it will ensure everyone is on the same version of the platform. Saba will have to deal with change management and culture issues however, in moving people to the cloud.

Saba Marketplace

The last and most significant part of Saba’s announcements at their Summit was their new Marketplace that is one of the first in the Talent Management market (Salesforce AppExchange was the first). Saba joins the growing number of Software and Services firms that allow third party applications to be integrated with their core applications. This gives enterprises choice and can also help to cut down on custom integrations. Saba’s marketplace initially includes Cisco WebEx, LinkedIn, Monster, SimplyHired,  TalentBin and Workday.

Final Thoughts

Clearly Saba has done some work on the user experience and UI side to ensure a better UX in Saba Cloud. Mixed with the predictive capabilities, we believe Saba is innovating, but will need to message Saba Cloud features around the business requirements and uses that really matter to users.