The market for human capital management suites is diverse, with a mix of ERP, HR and payroll vendors vying for top positions. With its latest research, Gartner has once again unveiled its Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Cloud HCM Suites.

Alongside heavy hitters like SAP, Oracle, and Workday, Darwinbox made its debut on the Gartner 2021 MQ for Cloud HCM suites for enterprises with 1000+ employees. The research assessed HCM key categories such as Core HR, Payroll and Benefits, Talent Management (Recruitment, Onboarding, Performance Management, Career Succession Management, Learning, Compensation and Workforce planning), Workforce Management (Time and Attendance), Reporting and Analytics, HR service delivery and the ability to deploy globally. 

Darwinbox also retained its position as the best-rated solution on Gartner’s Peer Insights platform with an average rating of 4.8 – the highest amongst any of its peers on the MQ.

On this news, Jayant Paleti, Co-founder of Darwinbox, said: "As a fast-growing technology company operating amongst players boasting a legacy of decades globally, we feel proud to have made our mark and we attribute our success to the amazing partnerships we've been able to see in our customers.

"We're humbled, in no mood of slowing down and will leave no stone unturned in making sure we deliver everything that our customers need to WIN," Paleti said.

Referring to Darwinbox’s customer experience and momentum, Gartner noted: "For its size, Darwinbox has strong customer traction. Furthermore, it has a rapidly growing number of customer ratings on Gartner’s Peer Insights platform, most of which are favourable."

In an exclusive conversation with People Matters, Chaitanya Peddi, Co-founder of Darwinbox, said that the number one differentiating factor for Darwinbox which helped the company assume a position on Gartner MQ has been their unique ability not only to understand but also solve for regional nuances for this part of the world. He said: "Asia, as unique as it is in its culture, values and lifestyles across countries, it’s as diverse in its expectations of work, workplace and workforce. This means having a singular focus on customer experience, technology and innovation, and value realisation, which have been our north star since inception."

Darwinbox's growth has been instrumental in the space of HCM. In January, the company reported that it had grown 300%+ since its last round of funding in 2019. What has worked well with Darwinbox’s success is its focus on adoption levels and consumer-grade experience. 

"Mobile-first, consumer-grade experience’ and ‘future-ready tech’ are not just buzzwords for us but the fundamental principles on which our product is built upon. So whether it’s the lightest HCM mobile app, integrating with Whatsapp for higher adoption, or leveraging deep-tech to drive exceptional employee experiences – we’re proud to boast some of the first for the industry," said Peddi.

He adds: "We’ve also focused on technology adoption as one of the biggest drivers of how we built Darwinbox and how we implement it. We also believe healthy adoption stats are a strong precursor to superior value realization and better ROI. We’ve seen adoption numbers averaging ~95% in the first few weeks of implementation for most customers and it was nice to see Gartner pick up on it and quote that Darwinbox is good value, compared to other vendors in this magic quadrant, in the MQ report."

When asked about the next innovations that the company is focusing on in their HCM suite, Peddi affirmed that Darwinbox has bolstered its focus on effective use of AI and ML in HR with a newly assembled specialist team, alongside multiple infrastructural investments. The team is constantly at work– identifying opportunities and innovating on how to better leverage data across employee lifecycle to enable better decision making and to deliver a more personalised employee experience (EX) at scale.

"In our pursuit of enabling a more powerful Talent One-View for your organization, we are working towards expanding the capabilities of our skills infrastructure built on top of our Graph DB. Leveraging Machine Learning to better define relationships between skills will add a layer of intelligence helping to assess skill gaps better, enable smarter choices in internal mobility and benchmark more accurately and as a result, recommend personalized learning and development experiences," remarked Peddi.

Aligned with the needs of the future of work, Darwinbox is working on a distinctive integrated talent experience underpinned by composite capabilities, comprising skills and competencies among other foundational elements. This would allow organizations to leverage relevant combinations of in-house capability artefacts, along with industry-aligned libraries, to connect touchpoints along the talent lifecycle.

Additionally, the company is continually investing in making the platform more secure and stable. The platform is currently used by 600+ enterprises and over 1.3 million employees. This India-based company has also added senior leaders to the Design and UX team and are investing in building out more capability within the team.

"Darwinbox is one of the most modular, configurable and extensible platforms on the market, thanks to a few infrastructural decisions we made early on. This allows us now to house the ability to potentially integrate with any system in the world that can add more value to your HR strategy. We are rapidly moving towards becoming a delivery platform for a set of curated services that will make life easier for your workforce - things like easier tax filing on the platform, enabling direct integrations to more talent marketplaces like LinkedIn, or enabling notifications on MS teams, Slack or Whatsapp etc," added Peddi.

Darwinbox is already making significant strides in expanding its product and service offering in multiple new geographies including the US and the Middle East. The company is now also focusing on new offices and key hires, expanding partner networks, and will be making heavy investments in global product roadmaps as shared by Paleti.