On February 24th Cornerstone OnDemand announced their plan to acquire rival Saba Software for approximately $1.4 billion in cash and stock. Each of the enterprise software companies went to market about twenty years ago with learning management solutions and over time broadened their product portfolios with other talent management offerings including performance management and talent acquisition. The combined company will serve more than 75 million users in about 7,000 organizations around the world and projects annual cloud subscription revenue of roughly $800 million.
Cornerstone has indicated that they plan to maintain and support Saba products and customers, although the lion’s share of ongoing investment and innovation will occur on the Cornerstone product's side; they'll port select functionality over from Saba and will leverage another recent acquisition, that of France-based Clustree, an AI-powered job-skills matching engine. The emerging company’s customers will benefit from a much larger product development team with a first order of business being the optimization of product portfolios.
Watch this video take for more details and analysis.