International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert))'s MarketScape report ranks 14 prominent talent management companies in terms of their current capabilities and makes some educated predictions about how these companies will perform in the field as time goes on.

A relative newcomer as an individuated field of study, talent management, or Human Capital Management (HCM), is a particular branch of HR that involves figuring out how to corral and maintain the best, most capable brains and bodies to work for a company. Buying top-of-the-line ergonomic chairs for your employees can only boost performance if the rear-ends sitting in them are capable, trained, and sufficiently suited to the tasks they must perform.

Companies benefit from professional, third party appraisals on these types of issues for a variety of reasons. If an employee performs exceptionally well under his or her manager, they sometimes implicitly become a threat to that manager's position. Company management finds itself in a conflict of interest situation when those in positions above them ask about employee performance. Poorly conducted talent management studies can sometimes fail to account for humanistic factors like employee workload and moral. Compounded the lack of motivation on behalf of management to reward high performance, a frustrated and unrewarded employee becomes difficult to differentiate from a recalcitrant, or a lazy one.

IDC's study discusses talent management vendors in both qualitative and quantitative terms. The Marketscape report analyzes the services offered by the discussed companies in terms of issues of which potential business owners must be aware in both the immediate and in the long-term. The vendors in IDC's study (Oracle (News - Alert), Saba, Taleo and ADP, to choose a few names at random) have performed at the top of their class. As IDC program director Lisa Rowan explains, the study makes extensive use of data from buyer research in order to gauge the efficacy of the companies involved.