Solving The Value Equation

Deal M&A Transactions in 2015 YTD

While investments in payroll services, HR technology, and HRO have been led by later stage financial and strategic buyers over the past few years, HR technology software continues to be a heavily invested sector.

The number of deals is being fueled by a combination of factors:

1. Debt financing is readily available at historically attractive rates and terms.

2. Strategic and financial buyers have an abundance of cash available for investment.

3. Over the last few years, corporate human resources departments have moved to software as a service, fueling the success of both SaaS and HRO companies.

4. In part, corporate human resources departments are trying to fill in gaps left by legacy systems in areas such as talent management and recruiting.

5. The valuations of the public companies in the HR Technology software is sector are high and receive high purchase price multiples.

6. Cloud technology bridges the gap to social, financial, payroll, and other functional back office and workforce management areas.

Microsoft Ignite 2015 Recap @MS_Ignite

Audience:

IT leaders across the globe came together in Chicago to share product roadmap plans and learn at Microsoft Ignite Conference which combines individual product conferences and brings them all under one roof such as PowerBI, Yammer, TechEd, Exchange, SharePoint, etc.. While Microsoft’s Build conference aimed at developers, the Ignite conference is aimed at businesses and features:

• Product demonstrations
• What's cooking in the Redmond kitchen
• Product roadmaps

Key Trends, Implications, Topics:

• Buyers now know more than sellers. Thus work has/will changed dramatically. For Microsoft products, it’s all about making work better/easier.
• Constant on-demand global workforce (40%+ of workers are dynamic), thus the rise of dynamic teams, always mobile collaboration early and often and on the go.
• The rise of Cloud Apps. "I’ve met with hundreds of organizations over the last year, and every single one of them has underestimated the number of cloud apps in their network – usually by a factor of at least ten! The average enterprise guess that their users are using between 30-40 SaaS apps, but what we are seeing with Cloud App Discovery is that there are 300+ SaaS apps at use in the average enterprise."

Microsoft Ignite Keynote Conference Summary. Watch the Live Keynote. On-Demand Sessions.

Product News:

• System Center 2016 – Has new provisioning, monitoring and automation abilities for your data center. A new preview is available.
  
• Microsoft to offer its basic suite of Internet of Things software for free.
  
• Skype for Business gains momentum – New features such as the ability to broadcast business meetings to 10,000 people; pre-loaded meeting attachments and in-call co-authoring.
  
• Azure RemoteApp (Ignite Keynote Demo Recap). In this demo we showed how a company can give their employees access to an existing Dynamics ERP deployment in IaaS, from any device, without the data ever being stored on the device. With Azure RemoteApp you can deliver the apps your users need to all of their devices – and to any platform. How this helps: It’s pretty amazing to consider that, with Azure Remote App, you do not have to build and maintain any infrastructure. You can upload your Windows apps to Azure and, leveraging the global footprint of Azure, deliver those applications to users anywhere in the world. Then, when a user requests a service we identify where in the world they are and then direct them to the closest Azure datacenter. You pay as you go and only pay for the capacity that is used.
  
• The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS). It's a new hybrid management service that supports Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware, and OpenStack. Amazing. Most organizations are faced with some really tough questions about how to manage the explosion of apps and data spread across their own infrastructure as well as clouds and cloud services from multiple vendors. No matter where this corporate data is residing, IT still has a responsibility to manage and secure it – OMS simplifies this traditionally difficult function by providing simple IT management for any hybrid cloud.
  
• Hey, workaholics: Microsoft Delve will track your 'work life balance'. The story behind the story: Employees may understandably have mixed feelings about this new tracking component of Microsoft Delve. Americans reportedly take only half of their allotted vacation time, apparently afraid they’ll be seen as less committed to their jobs than their coworkers. However, a company like Microsoft might actually look at statistics about the average time spent at work-related tasks, conclude that some workers might be burning out, and order them to take some time off. 
  
• SharePoint 2016.
  
• Microsoft Analytics Update @MS_Ignite 2015. Microsoft Power BI, with live dashboards and reports with drill-through, interactive, and powerful visual capabilities, connects both Excel and multiple disparate systems. The service also enables people to get answers fast with natural language Q&A. To help organizations get up and running quickly on Power BI, Microsoft provides out-of-the-box Templates. Download @ https://www.powerbi.com/
  
• Everything Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2015. http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/04/everything-microsoft-announced-at-ignite-2015-so-far/