2016 was a big year for HR tech. At TSC, we’ll remember it as:

• The year the nature of solutions changed to focus on the experience of being an employee — and irreversibly away from simple process automation
• The first year cloud HCM systems beat on-premise deployment
• A year of huge investments in HR tech;in fact, total VC investment in the last two years has surpassed the last 20, and this trend doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon

The employee engagement world continued to shake up last week — this time across the pond. London-based WorkAngel and global HCM player Ceridian completed a joint venture agreement to create LifeWorks, a mobile employee engagement platform.

At TSCIU, we see our role as being a leader in determining what’s coming in the HCM tech market. Too often, analysts lag behind, reporting on where the industry is, not where it’s going, and not putting any skin in the game on where it should go. As a result, in HCM and enterprise software, we’re lacking perspective on the future. TSCIU will take risks, and we will undoubtedly be proved wrong on some counts. But, we’re not passive observers. We’re intellectually and emotionally engaged in the future of HCM as central in enterprise software.