Edited on 11/03/2005: This evening, I received an e-mail from Workforce Magazine requesting that I remove some text of the Fidelity HRO article from my post. In my attempt to be a "good citizen" the text has been removed, but you can still hyperlink to the article. Here you go:
I found this article on Fidelity HRO on the Workforce.com website. As with other articles on specific vendors, I found it to be somewhat misleading. Chances are, Workforce.com interviewed a PR or marketing person for the article and simply reprinted the statements. I've publicly criticized other articles and corporate press releases in the past, so obviously I have no problem doing so now.
For example, the article states that Fidelity provides 2 or more services to over 100 companies with more than 10,000 employees. The first of these services could be 401(k) and the second could be ESPP. There is really no way of knowing how Fidelity characterizes "services" and if they are indeed HRO types.
What (if anything) do I agree with? It says that some analysts say Fidelity is in the top 3 or top 5 of HRO providers. My top 5 are Accenture, ACS, ADP, ExcellerateHRO, Fidelity and Hewitt (in alpha order). There are actually many HRO vendors looking for that 5th spot and are very close and I named 6 because in my opinion 3 of those 6 are tied for spots 4,5,6.
The last paragraph of the article talks about how Fidelity built it's own system and is courting the SAP and PeopleSoft users of the world. I'll just state that I don't have full confidence in Fidelity's build-out. They use the Oracle database as a platform and basically created code and tables from the ground up. Early installations went poorly and the functionality was incredibly weak but I have some confidence that the database is much improved. However, I don't know that it's SAP quality yet.
