Two weeks ago, Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire was telling The Street he saw growth ahead for his HR technology company.
“We are slowly growing our European operations,” Gregoire told The Street’s market analyst Debra Borchardt.
He must have had his tongue firmly in cheek as he said that, since today Taleo doubled its European operations with the acquisition of HR technology vendor Jobpartners for $38 million.
Based in the U.K., Jobpartners has 68 clients, including 16 of the Global 500, who deploy its suite of talent management products across 50 countries and 28 languages. Its product lineup mirrors what Taleo offers — recruitment, succession planning, performance management, and social networking tools — and, like Taleo, it is SaaS based.
Besides acquiring the clients, Taleo also gains feet on the street, doubling the size of its sales and support team in Europe.
“This acquisition creates an opportunity for us to accelerate our expansion outside of North America by increasing our customer base, increasing our local sales and support capacity, as well as taking advantage of the Jobpartners Eastern European development center,” said Gregoire in announcing the deal.
Nothing was said of the transition in the announcement; however, it’s a good bet that Taleo and Jobpartners representatives will be meeting with the European customers to discuss transitioning them to an all-Taleo lineup when it stops offering Jobpartners products.
The deal is expected to close in the third quarter and add between $2 and $3 million to Taleo’s revenues. The company had revenue of $71.5 million for the first quarter of this year, losing $2.17 million or 5 cents a share. However, Taleo has grown revenue each quarter for more than a year, despite the rocky global economy, which has translated into a stock price (up over $1 today at $35.50) that has more grown 75 percent since January of last year.
During that time, Taleo bought up three other companies — Cytiva, Learn.com, and Worldwide Compensation. Learn and Worldwide complemented Taleo’s suite, adding compensation and learning technology to the product lineup. Cytiva brought a number of SMB clients.