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In late July, cloud tech provider Ultimate Software announced they had closed a $300 million deal to buy French startup PeopleDoc, creators of a cloud-based platform for delivering human resources (HR) services.
Founded in 2007 by Jonathan Benhamou and Clément Buyse, PeopleDoc quickly carved out its own niche and, along the way, helped to define a new emerging technology category of HR service delivery.
The company's ability to automate employee processes, managing document acknowledgements, storage, and compliance across multiple global locations, has been getting a lot of attention by the media and analyst firms over the years, including Forbes, Inc. Magazine, and Gartner—and now human capital management leader Ultimate Software as well.
This deal will expand Ultimate's reach into new international markets, bringing them 1,000 new customers across 180 countries. The marriage between PeopleDoc and Ultimate Software is also expected to strengthen Ultimate's ability to automate HR processes, provide an online employee help center, enhance HR case management, and improve employee file management.
This latest move by Ultimate Software also reflects a growing demand by consumers for vertical-centric solutions that provide integrated enterprise content management (ECM) and process automation capabilities out of the box from a trusted source—their line-of-business (LOB) solution provider.
While many solution providers claim to have ECM and process automation capabilities, many of them fall short. Since PeopleDoc is designed to serve the HR community, the joining of these two companies should prove highly beneficial for current and future clients.
This is an acquisition to pay attention to and may signal more activity of this nature not only in HR but all industry verticals as time moves on.
Bob Larrivee is a recognized expert in the application of advanced technologies and process improvement to solve business problems and enhance business operations. He reports on the latest information management technologies for DOCUMENT Strategy. Follow him on Twitter @BobLarrivee or visit boblarriveeconsulting.com.
