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.

She subsequently downloaded product information from the Sonar6 website and spoke with a member of the sales team who assessed her as not a hot prospect.

“The pre-sale person thought it was fishy very early on,” Carden said. Just why isn’t clear from the notes, but it was likely, he agreed, that something turned up — or didn’t — during the initial vetting process.

Consequently, the Sonar6 team didn’t spend much time on the matter. “It didn’t take a whole of our time,” Carden noted. “We’re unlikely to pursue anything more.”

“More” that is beyond the flip tweet he sent Friday when IDG News Service broke the news of the lawsuit SucessFactors filed against Halogen, which it alleges manufactured both Anna Rodriguez and the Magnus Group in order to steal company secrets.

“Dear Halogen,” Carden tweeted, “we’ve had an anna.rodriguez@magnus-group.com interested in Sonar6, shall we send her your way? http://ht.ly/3UYhJ”

How many more companies did she contact? “Well,” says Carden, “it would appear that she wasn’t just contacting one group.”

Jason Corsello, senior VP at Knowledge Infusion, had the same thought the other day when he tweeted: “I have a feeling many HCM vendors are now looking for Anna Rodriguez of Magnus Group in their CRM system.”

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.

By fraud and deceit, says SuccessFactors, Halogen obtained proprietary information it otherwise couldn’t get, which “will cost (SuccessFactors) considerable, untold sales,” the IDG report says. A copy of the SuccessFactors complaint is here.

Halogen’s legal response asks that the suit be dismissed outright. IDG quotes this from the Halogen documents:

“SuccessFactors is embarrassed about what it has done, and it has brought suit alleging untenable claims that are all superseded by California’s Uniform Trade Secret Act in an effort to punish Halogen for SuccessFactors’ own failings … SuccessFactors fails to identify any ‘property’ that has been permanently deprived by Halogen, any instance in which its information was used or disclosed by Halogen, any specific ‘economic relations’ that have been interfered with, or any lost sales or profits as resulting from the conduct complained about.”

A Halogen spokeswoman said the company “will not comment” on the suit, though she noted, “The claims put forth by SuccessFactors are not proven.”

A SuccessFactors spokeswoman said the company would email me a statement, which hadn’t arrived when this post went live.

HR technologist and strategy consultant Naomi Bloom tweeted about the suit over the weekend, telling her nearly 2,900 followers: “I wouldn’t presume to know the legalities, but if #Halogen has done what is alleged, they they’ve been at a minimum stupid and unethical.”

She added: “Courts will resolve legalities of #SuccessFactors v #Halogen, but #Halogen prospects should take a hard look at the complaint against them.”

While the allegations, if true, would certainly make something of a mockery of Halogen’s corporate social responsibility declarations, the whole episode does make me wonder about how SuccessFactors vets its leads and prospects.

Not assuming the worst about the companies that contact you is not only excusable, but admirable. However, somewhere along the line it would seem reasonable to do a little research on a prospect that claims to be a 500-employee business process management consulting firm.

According to the IDG report of the suit, SuccessFactors said the prospect company called itself The Magnus Group. Its now-gone website listed it as located in Valparaiso, Indiana.

A Google search now turns up dozens of Magnus-related listings, but nothing for a company in Valparaiso. Nor is there anything on LinkedIn, either for The Magnus Group or SuccessFactors’ contact, Anna Rodriguez, with whom the vendor had multiple meetings.

Perhaps if SuccessFactors hadn’t been the victim of a scam before, not doing the basic homework on the client might be just embarrassing, as the Halogen legal response says. But that apparently didn’t happen until after Ms. Rodriquez informed the sales staff that The Magnus Group was no longer interested in the product.

“Fool me twice, shame on me.”

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.

Analysts at Oppenheimber and Webush have raised their price targets for Kenexa this week, a show of support for the company’s continued improvement. Oppenheimer rated Kenexa “outperform.”

(One side note: “We: How to Increase Performance and Profits Through Full Engagement,” a book written by Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan, hit the bestseller lists of both The New York Times and USA Today.)

Taleo, which closed Thursday at $33.89 (up 10.5 percent ) may have benefited from an Oppenheimer report, which maintained its”outperform” rating, while raising its price target for Taleo, going from $33 a share to $37.

Another financial firm, J.P. Morgan, though it did not offer any price guidance, noted in a report to investors that Taleo beat the consensus estimates and Morgan’s own.

Barron’s, in a detailed article on SuccessFactors’ financials, said its 4th quarter “exceeded expectations across most metrics due to exceptionally strong billings growth aided by its recently completed acquisitions, particularly Inform.”

The financial results and the company’s 2011 estimates prompted Barron’s to raise its earnings and revenues estimates. The financial publication says it expects SucccessFactors revenue to be $265.5 million for 2011 and to earn 10 cents a share.

As the numbers were being reported Wednesday, HR technology consultant Naomi Bloom tweeted an obvious question: “Has anyone noticed that Kenexa and SuccessFactors are posting losses? What don’t I understand here? Is there a new way to make money?”

A few minutes later, when Taleo’s report came out, she added this: “Taleo just in, and they lost a little money too. Does everyone expect to make it up in volume? I can’t wait for learned analysis on this.”

Jason Corsello, a vice president at Knowledge Infusion, offered his own take, echoing Bloom’s: “Growth, growth, growth, which I totally get, but my question is WHEN will they make money? How much? For how long? Your guesses?”

NOTE: Numbers in the chart accompanying this post are from the GAAP financials. Wall Street analysts typically look at adjusted financials (non-GAAP) and base estimates on those numbers. Most financial releases include operating financial reports that comply with GAPP and a reconciliation that doesn’t include certain financial expenses, such as one-time acquisition expenses, that distort the actual operating picture.

Taleo

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.

So it’s going to be up to the vendors to do some educating if they want to move that 2 percent to 3 percent.

Stirrup and Duncan Egan, Taleo’s senior director of marketing/Business Edition, offered some examples of how to use Taleo Insight, the analytics product the company has available for users of its Business Edition.

A recruiter could pull the last 10 candidate offers made to see what was finally accepted and use that information to counsel the hiring manager. Fortune 500 customer DaVita, a dialysis provider, used Taleo Analytics (the enterprise version of Insight) to reduce the time to hire nurses, saving $12.1 million.

While those examples focus on recruitment (Taleo knows who reads ERE), other uses abound. Workforce planning, for instance. More than a few high tech firms have been caught by surprise when key employees became fully vested and announced their departure.

That’s not likely to be the kind of thing many HR generalists are going to see — and flag — as a critical business data point. Which is part of the reason (no doubt there are others) that SuccessFactors began calling its HR products “Business Execution” and Kenexa launched a 2X platform and a trademarked  “ X e = s.”

Rudy Karsan, Kenexa’s CEO, said as much at the company’s analyst day last month. Six of Kenexa’s biggest new customers came from directly pitching top executives on the data and business intelligence capabilities of its TM products.

Now Taleo, which HR tech columnist Bill Kutik said has been muttering about talent intelligence, is shouting about it.

““It’s a staggering reality that most companies know more about their laptops and copiers than they do about their people,” Mike Gregoire, CEO and chairman of Taleo, says in the press release announcing today’s evolution of the company’s talent management strategy.

“That’s a woefully outdated strategy. CEOs need to think completely differently about their workforce. ”

Talent Insight, the analytics package for the SMB market, comes with 40 pre-built reports, derived from what user focus groups said were most helpful. More will be added. It’s permission based, so the C-titled can pull any report and even create custom reports. Downstream, users get access to information according to their need and pay grade.

Egan insisted that Talent Insight was not merely a stripped down version of the enterprise product. “It’s a separate product,” he said, coming out of a separate work group at Taleo. The emphasis was on usefulness and usability.

“We strived to make it as easy to use as Facebook or Amazon.com,” Egan said. That’s certainly a wise approach, considering that the product’s target — companies with fewer than 5,000 employees — is only a generation or two removed from the filing cabinet.

When I asked Egan and Stirrup what the takeaways should be from the demo, the pre-built reports and crossplatform capability of Taleo Insight made the list, as did its intelligent report builder capability.

Someone, I don’t recall who, summed it up even better: Taleo Insight — and for that matter, the industry’s entire effort to reinvent itself — “gives you the past, present and future of your workforce so you can make better and smarter business decisions.”

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.