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Taleo's uses a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model for its solutions, where businesses purchase products on a contract basis. Because the company's solutions are Web enabled and are designed as open platforms, its partners can easily integrate their own solutions along with Taleo's. While Taleo's strategic partners do not make any margin when they sell Taleo solutions, they do gain access to Taleo's entire customer base, says Didi D'Errico, a Taleo spokesperson.

Hunter says that while companies such as Oracle and SAP have talent management applications, their solutions are primarily delivered, on-premise, whereas Taleo's is hosted through SaaS.

“There are different levels of adoption rates,” Hunter said. “Most of the market is more inclined to move towards Taleo's solutions because these applications are easier to use and have more functionality. With other vendors, applications are a bit more complicated because more work is involved.”

As a testament to its expanding partnerships, Taleo today announced Worldwide Compensation, a company that focuses on performance driven total compensation software solutions, as its newest partner. The company also announced the launch of Taleo Business Edition Perform, a software solution that enhances its current Business Edition product, designed for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Business Edition Perform is a solution built from the ground up that helps to automate performance management roles for end-users, allowing employees to easily collaborate with one another via a customized intranet Web site. The suite is a predictive and functional solution that Taleo says works with Microsoft Outlook to allow executives to make better business decisions. Some features of Business Edition Perform include, cascading goal management, built-in competencies and an employee Web site, just to name a few.

For the 2009 year, Taleo will introduce the second phase of its flagship product, Monarch, a new Candidate Relationship Management module, and three different Exchange software solutions.

“Monarch is the next evolution of our talent management solution for recruiting,” Gregoire said. “It's all about the new recruiting experience, where there's more functionality and detail and it's also built on an open platform so it's easy to use.”

David Burlington, group vice-president of applications and technology at Taleo, said Taleo's Monarch product will feature some of the design concepts taken from Web 2.0 and will feature an easy-to-use, walk-up user interface.

Taleo's Candidate Capture solution is an enhancement to the vendor's talent management solution that integrates with Microsoft Outlook.

“It's an Outlook-based process that lets employees perform every day functions directly from Outlook,” Burlington said. “Employees can search for jobs, match candidates and can capture the source of the candidates, all without having to leave Outlook.”

Taleo customers will also next year see three different Exchange solutions, which include, Solutions Exchange for finding and viewing partner solutions and ratings; Talent Exchange, to submit, collaborate and exchange source talent from an open marketplace; and Knowledge Exchange, a solution that lets employees collaborate with one another to build out their own network.

“We believe leveraging these Exchange solutions will help (customers) take talent management to the next level and will therefore help them win the war for talent,” Burlington said.