Taleo launches new SMB unit 9 May, 2007 By Liam Lahey

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Blessing will be responsible for strategy, sales, marketing, services, support, and product development for all solutions targeted at the SMB market including the Taleo Business Edition and Taleo Hourly Express product lines.

The new business unit is a great thing for our customers globally, as it shows Taleo's commitment and laser focus on the SMB space, Blessing said.

This new business unit is being run like a separate company under the Taleo umbrella, allowing us to have the best of both worlds -- the innovation and agility of a small company combined with the security and resources of a larger company, he explained. Expect us to continue to leverage the scale and brand of Taleo. We will, where it makes sense, borrow from our enterprise engineering team to bring world-class intellectual property to the SMB product line.

Conversely, because we have the ability to act autonomously, we are able to focus on the areas where the approaches in the SMB space need to differ from the enterprise space. You can expect to see us continue to take an approach tailored to SMB in the areas of sales, consulting, and product development.

Prior to Taleo, Blessing was a regional vice president in the SMB unit at Oracle Consulting with management responsibility for a number of U.S. and Canadian regions. In this capacity, he was responsible for managing the direct and indirect sales force as well as client delivery and satisfaction. He has a deep technical background and understanding of product development and product lifecycles through more than a decade of experience in consulting at both PeopleSoft and PriceWaterhouse. His services experience includes participation in a number of large ERP system rollouts and management responsibility for global software implementations.

The business unit will be a good thing for our partners and they are a very important part of our three-year business plan, Blessing continued. We have a dedicated team of resources focused exclusively on forging strong alliances with other name brand vendors in the SMB space. We are actively working on a number of partnerships to expand the overall breadth and value of our offering and leverage already established distribution channels.

The Taleo Business Edition is designed to enable recruiters to set up a career site in hours, configure in minutes, and process applicants immediately. In the SMB market, Taleo Business Edition has set the standard for how SMBs do eRecruiting in a complete on-demand environment.

With its recent acquisition of JobFlash, Taleo now also offers Taleo Hourly Express to the SMB market, a complete bilingual phone and online hourly hiring solution for the retail, restaurant, hospitality, gaming, security, manufacturing, and service industries. Fast growing and seasonal businesses can hire better hourly candidates faster with the solutions automated application, pre-screening, scheduling, and on-boarding processes.

Blessing said the JobFlash acquisition brought Taleo three key assets: A strong, loyal customer base; best in class hourly workforce scheduling; and a very talented sales and development team (the company has had 100 percent retention).

The addition of the hourly recruiting solution to our product line gives us a breadth of functionality unmatched by any other offerings in the SMB space, he remarked. We can now handle any type of recruitment scenario from the typical salaried hire, facilitated by a traditional career website to an hourly hire where the entire application, screening, and scheduling process happens over the phone.

Thanks to a shrinking labour force, a strong economy, and the ease of implementing our solution, the demand for Taleos products continues to be very robust across all industries and geographies.

That said there are certainly industries where the need for talent management solutions is more acute, he noted.

We continue to see strong demand for talent management solutions from the staffing, healthcare, professional services, financial services and high technology industries, he said. These are all industries where we have dominated the competition historically and will continue to invest in vertical functionality to serve our growing customer base.

Taleos SMB customer base has more than doubled over the past year and there are currently more than 600 customers who subscribe to SMB software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions from Taleo, officials added.

We have been able to achieve this growth thanks to our efficient sales process, a simple yet highly configurable product delivered via the SaaS model, along with great customer service, Blessing added. The priority in 2007 is to continue to invest (doubling investment in some areas) in the areas of sales, customer support and engineering to continue to fuel this level of customer acquisition and product innovation.

Taleo offers a free 30-day trial of the Taleo Business Edition. Surf to: www.taleo.com/solutions/business-edition-solutions.