Cornerstone recently announced Cornerstone Edge, a new cloud computing architecture and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that provides clients, partners and third-party developers with easy-to-use new tools and services to quickly create and deploy new and existing applications within the Cornerstone suite of applications. Jason Corsello, Vice President of Strategy for Cornerstone OnDemand, answers a few questions on what the platform announcement means for developers and businesses.
Businesses have seen the value in robust talent management applications to manage their people and now they are looking for ways to increase the flexibility and extensibility of their investments. We believe enterprise applications of the future need to have powerful, componentized platform capabilities that enable companies to easily connect their employee applications and build unique applications on an open platform with easy-to-use tools.
With Cornerstone Edge, including open APIs and drag-and-drop development tools, we can now offer full flexibility to businesses to quickly build complete talent solutions that fit their current needs and can also easily adapt as their business changes. Ultimately our goal is to deliver a cloud development platform for both technical and non-technical users where they can build applications in less than one hour.
We are already on target to have over fifty Cornerstone Marketplace apps by the end of 2015 – there’s been lots of innovation so far. Many that have been developed are "edge applications" that extend current Cornerstone applications. Innovation amongst our ecosystem is happening with both "integrated" apps and third-party applications that are integrated or embedded into Cornerstone, as well as "platform" apps created by Cornerstone client or partners.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to building mobile applications on Cornerstone Edge. Last year, during our Cornerstone Hackathon, one of our teams built a mobile application to manage internal events and leveraged the same app to share photos and videos from the event on Cornerstone Connect, our social collaboration solution. Many of our clients have completely embraced mobile devices and our ability to support any device, via our platform strategy, will be very powerful.
Cornerstone Edge gives Cornerstone a new capability to build more in-depth, industry-focused solutions. Great industry solutions require a unique combination of industry-specific services, content and applications. Many of our partners have very specific industry expertise and we anticipate many will build unique applications specific to their domain expertise.
One example is the Continuous Professional Development app built by our partner, Tribridge. This was an application build specifically for the legal industry to track compliance training progress based on industry-specific requirements to track by jurisdiction, subject matter, training type, and more. We intend to work closely with our partners to build out complete, industry focused offerings that include the combination of both packaged ISV applications and created apps built on the platform.
Over the next few years we will see some very creative use cases leveraging Cornerstone Edge that have not yet emerged. What makes Cornerstone and Cornerstone Edge unique is our reach. While many of our SaaS peers deploy their solutions to specific teams within an organization, we deploy to every employee at nearly every company we work with, which makes our platform opportunity unique and potentially game-changing. Any application that a business wants to reach all of its employees can now be built using Cornerstone Edge.
