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About that Anna Rodriguez, HR head of the fictitious Magnus Group. She was a busy lady.

Besides allegedly scamming SuccessFactors, she roamed the aisles of last fall’s HR Tech show, stopping to chat up the folks at the Sonar6 “unbooth.”

Mike Carden, Sonar6 co-founder, called from headquarters in New Zealand to say the company had a few contacts with Rodriquez, the first at the tech show in Chicago. keep reading…

Update: SuccessFactors has issued a statement noting that both sides in the suit have stipulated to a restraining order prohibiting Halogen from disclosing or using any of the information it may have gained via the Magnus Group.  SuccessFactors President Doug Dennerline said:

Although we would rather devote all our energy to building great products and providing great services to our customers and more than 8 million users, we have a responsibility to take action to protect SuccessFactors, including our employees, customers, investors and partners, in the face of such a blatantly fraudulent and unethical attack. We plan to vigorously pursue this lawsuit.”

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

That adage came to mind this weekend after the news broke that SuccessFactors is suing Halogen Software alleging it had been scammed by its Canadian competitor in the HR software business.

Whether or not the claims made by SuccessFactors are true, it’s the second time in the last two years the San Francisco Bay area vendor has gone to court alleging it was pimped by a competitor.

In March 2008 it sued Softscape (since acquired) over a disparaging PowerPoint that was supposedly created by an unhappy SuccessFactors’ customer and circulated to clients of the company.

In the latest legal battle, the technology news service IDG reported Friday that SuccessFactors claims Halogen created a dummy company with a sham website in order to trick SuccessFactors into providing detailed company and product information, including confidential pricing information. keep reading…

With their stock price zooming today, HR software vendors Taleo and SuccessFactors have got to be enjoying Wall Street’s reaction to their 2010 financial results.

Taleo reported a small profit. SuccessFactors reported a pretty sizable loss. But both companies did better in most areas than financial analysts had expected and both predicted strong first quarters and full-year performance.

SuccessFactors estimated its current quarter would see revenue in the range of $62.5 million to $63.5 million and $265 million-$270 million for the full year. Taleo, which beat Wall Street’s 4th quarter revenue estimate of $67.3 million by just over 5 percent, also expects a strong 2011.

The company’s stock closed today at $35.01, up 16.3 percent on the day.

Kenexa, which saw its share price climb Wednesday, was down about 1 percent today, closing at $24.33. The company beat its own income prediction, coming in at $7.4 million, or half a million above its top-end estimate. It also beat its earnings per share guidance by 1 cent.

Kenexa’s 2011 estimate is for revenue in the $240 million to $248 million and per share earnings of 62 cents to 82 cents. The guidance is in the range of Wall Street’s estimates. keep reading…

Taleo officially joins the ranks of the repositioned today, declaring that its “next era of talent management” shall henceforth be known as “Talent Intelligence.”

In a word, what that means is analytics, or, if you prefer, metrics.

What’s so special about that, you may be asking, that it merits more than a mention? If it was merely a rebranding of talent management (and it is partly that), it probably wouldn’t. However, it is part of an industry-wide effort by vendors to educate employers, especially those with a “C” as the first letter of their title, to the value that lies within their HR systems.

Where the first wave of TM products were positioned as electronic assistants, providing easy storage and retrieval of employee records, products have now matured so far that they can be valuable tools in managing the business.

As Taleo’s VP of Product Marketing Ashley Stirrup said last week, companies spend billions ($100 billion according to the Taleo demo) buying and operating their ERPs, CRMs, and SCMs. When it comes to people management, Taleo says the spend is 2 percent of that.

With the pie chart showing those numbers up on our WebEx screen, Stirrup observed, “It really highlights how little companies know about their employees.”

One reason for that is that except in a few areas — sales comes to mind immediately — quantifying performance is difficult. Another reason is that it has only been the last few years that the software systems have become sufficiently sophisticated and integrated to allow managers to extract relevant employee information and link it to operational and production data.

HR hasn’t done enough to promote these capabilities and show the CFOs and CEOs how to use the power of these systems to advise their business decisions. For that matter, line managers and directors barely know about this. In fact, there’s a better than even money chance that most HR professionals themselves don’t know how to use their systems for business intelligence. keep reading…

Staffing services provider TempWorks Software (profile; site) is suing competitor Avionte, claiming the young startup pirated the programming code for its staffing software.

In a press release announcing the filing of the suit in federal court, TempWorks claimed Avionte “pirated significant elements of TempWorks source code and database design and made use of proprietary TempWorks marketing materials.”

Avionte founder and CEO John Long dismissed the lawsuit as a publicity stunt by the company where he was once president. “We vehemently deny this. Not only didn’t we steal a single line of code, it’s physically impossible for us to have.”

He said the controversy between the two companies has been going on for months, but it wasn’t until Avionte sued TempWorks in state court late last month alleging interference with its customers that the federal suit was filed.

“We told them we’d submit both sets (of programming code) to a third party evaluator and stand by the results. We even said we’d pay for it,” but they never responded to us, Long told us.

TempWorks executives couldn’t be reached. But in the press release Founder and CEO Gregg Dourgarian said of the decision to sue, “It’s only fair to those who have invested in a career or a business relationship with TempWorks that we confront in a court of law those who might attempt to plagiarize years of our hard work.”

The press release pointedly noted that that the four founding partners of Avionte are all former TempWorks employees. Long was previously president of TempWorks and one of the company’s original employees. His partner and Avionte Chief Technology Officer Phi Ngo had been a senior analyst at TempWorks. Sandeep Acharya, Chief Operations Officer, had been TempWorks director of consulting services. And Samar Basnet, chief software architect at Avionte, had been a senior software analyst for TempWorks.

A few other of the 17 Avionte employees are TempWorks expatriates, a situation which can’t help relations between the two Eagen, Minn. companies. Avionte, like TempWorks, is a staffing software vendor offering a front and back office solution that integrates with Outlook and back office financial programs. The company was founded in 2006.

The 60-employee TempWorks, founded in 1994, also offers payroll funding and processing for staffing firms and a disaster recovery service.