Fantastic to see ADP and Lifion Team continue to progress and make waves in the industry. World leading HR Tech analyst Josh Bersin’s view on ADP and it’s next-gen technologies and business below. It was a unique pleasure founding and leading Lifion by ADP.
Excerpt form Josh’s article (full article at https://joshbersin.com/2019/09/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/)
ADP, An Unexpected Tech Leader
This industry is not for the faint of heart. Building an enterprise platform takes years, and once you start you’re stuck with the architecture you start with.
Workday’s architecture is fourteen years old and quite innovative, it feels proprietary. SuccessFactors is similar in age and is now being re-engineered around SAP Hana and a new Experience interface. Oracle recently re-engineered its HCM platform and it took almost five years. So when a company like ADP starts from scratch, it can upset the apple cart.
While many customers rushed to buy cloud-based HCM systems, their satisfaction has been mixed. The platforms are highly complex, they don’t accommodate new organization and performance models, and buyers want more innovation. HR departments want a stable, reliable HCM platform but they also want to be able to mix and match the best of breed on top.
Today, using what is called “cloud-native” systems, vendors can build modern applications faster than ever. And technologies like AI, cognitive interfaces, natural language processing, and graph database are readily available from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft.
Enter ADP.
ADP you say? Aren’t they a 70-year-old payroll company? What are they doing in the cloud architecture business?
Well yes, ADP does pay more than 40 million people in the US (one in six). But behind the scenes, the company is filled with technologists, and its new Lifion group has assembled some of the most senior tech architects in the world.
As Carlos Rodriguez the CEO and Don Weinstein the head of Global Product and Technology put it, ADP used to be a “services company fueled by technology.” Now it is becoming “a technology company with great services.” In other words, the company has heavily invested in its platform.
The new platform, today called ADP Next Gen HCM (a real name will come), has the architecture other vendors only talk about, and as it picks up speed it could become a major disruptor in the market.
What Is ADP Next Gen HCM?
Let me explain what ADP has done.
Through a skunk-works development team in Chelsea, NY, the company has been rewriting its payroll engine and HCM platform for several years. The project, originally called Lifion, is a “cloud-native” platform which embraces the latest technology stack needed to scale for the future.
Full article at: https://joshbersin.com/2019/09/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/