Analyst Perspectives

Here are some insights on Ultimate Software drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation management vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Ultimate Software and six other vendors in seven categories, five product-related (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two concerning the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each of the seven categories to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on data derived from our benchmark research on total compensation.

Ultimate Software and its product, UltiPro, place seventh in this Value Index, but also earned Value Index Leader status in the Validation category. Total compensation management is not one of Ultimate Software’s product emphasis areas, but the offering provides valuable capabilities such as the ability to automatically apply geographic differentials by locations and pay grades and configure an unlimited number of bonus pools and salary plans for budgeting and allocation purposes. It can display metrics and KPIs at different incentive payout levels and automatically recalculate payouts when a worker’s status changes. UltiPro is a unified HCM suite so it provides tight integration with performance management.

Ultimate’s best scores are in the Reliability and Adaptability categories, the former due to a major emphasis in product design and cloud infrastructure on performance and scalability. A customer’s ability to configure an unlimited number of bonus pools and salary plans for budgeting and allocation purposes, the product’s major configurability around compensation statements and its organic linkage with compensation management across the unified suite contributed to its high score in Adaptability.

Ultimate’s compensation offering is more suited today for traditional forms of compensation. It also would benefit from improvement in the areas of TCO/ROI, as it offers less-than-robust ROI and business case support, and Validation, due to only modest signs of investment and product advancements.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of total compensation management software in the industry. You can learn more about our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool here. Participating vendors can learn more about how to use the Value Index here.