Think cloud | Think ATS | Think Salesforce

I had a demo yesterday by Job Science who have created a very neat ATS based on the Salesforce platform with a very sensible cost for pretty much any size of organisation from 1 User upwards.

There are a number of other vendors in this space such as Taleo which I will cover in more detail in a special report due out in January.  But where does the potential of Salesforce leave other ATS vendors?  Shaking, hiding, laughing???

For those who do not know Salesforce, they are a sales force automation and CRM technology vendor,  purely web based/SaaS.  They have 40,000+ customers and a big community of developers which has developed hundred's of 'modules and add-ons' the Job Science ATS being one very good example.

You can also get a free trial to see more about what they do! 

By opening up their platform SF have been able to develop their offer well beyond CRM and are in effect a Cloudware Vendor who has a highly configurable, secure, reliable platform that can be used to create pretty much any type of process driven application a developer wants to create or plug into.  So apart from changing their name it means that a small company (or large) can create a number of their own unique modules without having to worry about the underlying platform.  A few ideas:

• Integrate with a job posting tool.
• Integrate with a career site CMS.
• Integrate the CRM (candidate marketing) element with an existing ATS.
• Create an HR system.
• Create an employee referral process.

The options are endless yet the underlying costs of hosting, database management, hardware etc are all taken care of by SF.  This changes the 'ATS Vendor' model somewhat and questions are they a technology vendor or is their IP their industry knowledge rather than the technology?  Either way, I think we will be seeing a lot from the likes of Job Science and Taleo in 2009 as they look to exploit shrinking budgets and headcount and an increase in the need of recruitment automation. 

They are looking like the ALDI of the recruitment software market; and we know how well they are doing!  People will still need to eat AND recruit in 2009.