SilkRoad Technologies Strengths & Weaknesses

SilkRoad Talent Management Software

SilkRoad’s competitive positioning in the talent management software market can be summarized by highlighting the following strengths and weaknesses.

SilkRoad’s Talent Management Software Strengths
 

• The Microsoft-like user interface (UI) has a simple, familiar feel that should appeal to a wide swath of users and potentially lessen the associated learning curves new applications often encounter.
• SilkRoad’s RedCarpet application for on-boarding is an industry leader.
• SilkRoad Point mobile-enabled capabilities appear to be explicitly designed for touchscreen use; functionality that should be particularly appealing for tablet users and executives that consume data.
• Although still best-suited to those organizations looking for position-based succession management functionality, SilkRoad’s successor identification capabilities (especially via their faceted search and data mining) are stellar.
• The company’s expansion efforts have allowed customers to reach a number of emerging markets that few other vendors can match.
• Industry accolades have highlighted SilkRoad’s penchant for innovation—especially in terms of what the company is doing for collaboration and social integration into their product line.
• The company’s impressive customer support/relationship management is consistently rated by analysts and customers as one of the most compelling aspects of SilkRoad’s approach.
• SilkRoad Point provides one of the talent management industry’s few evolving indications of knowledge gaps via a social application.
• Though not without its limitations, each aspect of the company’s Life Suite software modules can be tailored for branding purposes, individual use, and access to role-based or relevant information.

SilkRoad’s Talent Management Software Weaknesses
 

• Although a distinctly workforce management element (and expected to be remedied through partnerships), current functionality for time and attendance are absent.
• The acquisition strategy that has propelled SilkRoad to its current status is also responsible for creating integration issues between products. In fact, the single-most cited complaint about the Life Suite system is that inter-product integration needs to be tighter.
• Though more an unfortunate by-product of the company’s strategy for offering the Life Suite modules a la carte, products often run on their own separate databases.
• The lack of a sophisticated visual software customization tool, PaaS toolkit and online ecosystem of pre-integrated third party applications leave customers with few good options when the HR or talent management software is missing particular feature sets or requires software customization.
• SilkRoad’s international language capabilities do not match up with the company’s expansion efforts and currently support is only provided in English.
• Distinctly absent from Life Suite’s HRMS offering HeartBeat are capabilities for payroll processing. However, customers do have the option to integrate to 3rd-party applications for unidirectional runs.
• Potentially changing with the company’s latest pivot towards an IPO, SilkRoad suffers from a brand recognition problem when competing directly against larger HR and talent management software vendors.
• Compared with some of its larger competitors, SilkRoad’s analytics capabilities are not as advanced—especially with regard to those held by Oracle, SAP and Workday.
• Although web-based and critical severity support is available 24-7, businesses with operations extending into weekend and/or U.S. holiday hours may find difficulty with SilkRoad’s email/phone support schedule.
• While subscribing to the somewhat arbitrary security tenets of SSAE 16, SilkRoad has not pursued the more internationally-recognized ISO 27001 security and data center attestation.

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