Despite its limitations, BrassRing is a reliable tool, especially for big organizations like ours. When we had problems, we found ways to make it work, even if it wasn't perfect. It is a system we can trust, and we rarely had downtime or issues during my eight to nine years using it. BrassRing's team always lets us know ahead of time if there is planned maintenance. In short, BrassRing has been dependable and useful.

I've been with Best Buy since 2013, but prior to that I was with another client. What I will say is, I feel like it's more stable now than it was a few years ago. I think what I noticed was when IBM purchased them, there was that time where they were trying to identify where Kenexa fit. What I've really seen over the last two years is a commitment and a doubling down by IBM to do that talent component right. It's really made the product feel, not only stable, but they're investing in it. It's evolving much faster than it was a couple of years ago.

I had been using this system for five years, and very rarely – you can probably count on one hand the number of times – there would be a significant impact to down time in the system, which is huge for a company like us. If the system is down, because of our volume, every minute counts. If something does happen, they're always extremely reactive. When things happen, we've been on the phone late at night not just with tech support, but with engineers and some heavy duty hitters, which is huge.

Overall, the stability is very good. Very few blips here and there, but overall it's excellent.

Sometimes there is a slight delay in calculation time, about a minute or two (not hours) while Watson is crunching the numbers. This usually owes to the fact that there are huge data sets that the supercomputer is chomping on, and you're not the only person out there using it. There are no core stability issues, as the software is rock solid: classic IBM resilience and polish.

By and large, IBM has maintained a tremendous stability record over time, both in terms of end-user access as well as candidate access.

We have great up-time with Kenexa. I've used some of the competitors before. I hadn't had that experience. We've had really great up-time with that. A lot of our questions are answered within a reasonable time.

We've had really good luck with uptime and run time. Typically, it's very low time when things go down; maybe once a month or something, for a short period, and they're very quick to fix.

The stability's very good. Overall, we typically don't have any unexpected downtimes during the month.

When we first moved to Kenexa in 2011, at that point they were Kenexa and there was a certain type of culture and a way of working. I think since then, they're coming together with IBM. We've seen that at our own organization as well. You see the culture change, but for us I think it's going to change for the better. I think what we're now seeing is the ability to be able to look at IBM, who are a much bigger organization who are offering us the leadership and the insights that we never had before. It enables us to share that information with leaders, line managers, and HR professionals, all of whom are learning from a partner as well. That's a real benefit for us as well. That's where it's working very well.

From a survey perspective as well, obviously, learning the survey on day one, when we launch it, that's the moment of truth. Colleagues, leaders, line managers, even HR professionals would not be aware of the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes in order to be able to get to that day. I'm pleased to say that on every single occasion, we've been able to land the survey in the right way at the right time. It's been an increasingly positive experience for colleagues as well, and that's reflected in the huge amount of people, typically one out of five people in our organization of 80,000, are responding on day one. I think that's testament to the work that goes on behind the scenes.

For that to happen, you've got to have good project managers. I think what we've found over the last few years, since being with Kenexa, is a really strong project management team. They work with us very closely, we're having regular calls with them, regular meetings, specifically about the projects. I want to have an ongoing dialogue with IBM. For me, that's very different to the conversations we need to have with the project team. We have been working with the project managers, who have done a brilliant job in really getting to know us and to know how we work. The PM may have a project plan of 10 or 100 actions, but understanding the time it takes us to turn things around in our own organization as well has been really important. That's been very good. If there have been any issues, not with the downtime, but in terms of the project management, IBM have been willing to have an open conversation about what we can do to improve it.

For example, in my team, the number of people isn't increasing. The amount of work that we've got, however, is. We need to be much more efficient and much more effective in how we're delivering these. One of our ambitions is to run more research and to have more continuous-listening type dialogues with the business. If we spend that amount of time and use all our resources focusing on these huge surveys that we have in the organization, we're going to leave ourselves with little or no time to really focus on building that continuous listening program out into the wider business. We're constantly looking at how we can make the process, how we can make the project management, more efficient. IBM and the Kenexa team have done a brilliant job in helping us to do that.

The upside of Kenexa is that they're constantly reinventing, so they have constant releases with new features and upgrades. The downside of that is that they do experience fairly regular issues with stability that they're not always as quick to respond to as we'd like them to.

We encountered IT stability issues in our attempts to get the pages to load. This occurred almost daily.

We have not had any issues to date in terms of stability. With Kenexa, we have just implemented Workday, so we are hoping that we'll have a pretty seamless integration with the talent acquisition module, so our fingers are crossed on that front. We'll see. We're going though that work right now.

IBM Kenexa is fairly stable. We don't have any downtime.

I think it's very stable, I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. I have not encountered any stability issues at all.

It was very stable. We rarely had outages with Kenexa Brassring.

It seems stable. I don't have any concerns about it.

It's been really stable the last couple of years. I've seen a huge improvement on the BrassRing Kenexa side to improve their network connectivity and systems overall.

I think it functions well and they’re always innovating and adding new features that we’re always implementing and making the process better.

It is quite stable. There have only been a few IT downtimes. 

Also, it is quite dependent upon how SAP functions. 

It is more or less stable most of the time and in general, I do not have any problems with stability.

I've found that there's a consistency to the product that we have not had concerns with downtime issues and looking forward that there's always a robust road map that gives us some idea of where the technology is moving so that we can be prepared for those shifts.

Stability has been fine. We've had some timeouts but they've been quickly fixed. Stability has been fine. There have been no issues at all.

It seems fairly stable. It's a stable platform in terms of what has been released in recent upgrades. They're all pretty minor; hasn't been anything revolutionary. The updates that have been made are all for the better.

Rarely any stability issues were encountered. There were a few minor issues from time to time but overall this product is fairly reliable.

The product was so fussy to make any changes that we tried not to do anything different. Clearly this isn't a great way to support a business. I was not around for the implementation, but I had to deal with the outcome. Unfortunately, the system was slammed in without much thought to, well, anything. Cleaning up this mess was so difficult, it took weeks to get anything changed or modified, even for the simplest stuff. It was easier to live with what we had and work around it than it was to change it.

As a platform, it is highly stable.

I've never had any stability issues. There’s been no downtime. Occasionally they'll let us know that there's an update happening, but usually that's during off hours; things like that, so no biggies. It's not affecting my business.

The stability of the tool is okay. We didn't have major issues.

Here and there we did have stability issues.