Even though the HR Technology conference was in Las Vegas this year, I promise we are not talking about anything inappropriate in the column today. In fact, the biggest amount of craziness actually didn’t occur among the Lockton HR Technology and Outsourcing team while in Sin City. Instead, we returned to find that the three teammates we left guarding the fort had gotten a little creative with the decorations of our cubes and our offices. Now I’m conflicted: do we take them with us next year to prevent random acts of decoration and sabotage or do we leave them behind to see how they can possibly top what they did this year?

The HR Technology conference has always been a little light in the attention paid to the area of employee benefits. Talent Management and especially Recruiting tend to get center stage and a lot of press. In fact, every 3^rd vendor I visited on the Expo floor seemed to have a recruiting or performance theme to them.

For our team, however, employee benefits remains half of what we spend our time consulting on so we are always looking to see which vendors and solutions are heavily marketing their presence. In past years, there have been as few as one or two major Benefit Administration vendors exhibiting. This year, there was a considerable increase – although nowhere near the number of vendors we’re used to working with on a regular basis.

For those firms that focus just on core Benefits Administration, the vendors exhibiting included (I’m going to list them alphabetically to remove any perception of favoritism): Benefitfocus, Businessolver, Ebix, Empowered Benefits and EBS – a.k.a. Workterra. (Obviously only vendors beginning with a B or E were allowed onto the showroom floor.)  This list is actually almost twice as long as it has been in the past. It’s affirming to see so many vendors making the significant investment to market their abilities. More than likely this points right back to the impact of healthcare reform.

Speaking of the Affordable Care Act, Equifax used this opportunity to highlight their workforce management solution which sits in the nexus between benefits and time and attendance. They ended up taking an HR Technology Innovator award home for their trouble. I didn’t get a chance to visit the Kronos booth but I’m sure they were showing their solutions as well. Compliance was the #1 theme with these benefits vendors, with decision-support and employee engagement as strong followers.

Discovery Benefits was present, highlighting their ancillary benefit management (COBRA, FSA, etc.) and of course, there were the all-in-one/Swiss Army vendors (ADP, Ceridian, Paychex) with a benefits module to complete the ubiquitous wheel of services every vendor displays. There were also a handful of voluntary and ancillary benefits vendors present such as Spotlight and Winston Benefits. But, even including these folks, HR Tech provides a lot less exposure to the width and breath of the benefits industry than a typical benefits-focused conference where the these vendors are Legion.

In general, we saw vendors expanding their presence considerably. Businessolver doubled the size of their booth from this year to last year. (And they seemed to have finally appeased the gods of booth location after several years of being stuck on the periphery.) EBS has really refined their marketing presence as well. I don’t know of a vendor who has been more transformative of the last three years–although Benefitfocus’ transition from carrier-based to direct-sales five years ago still is the high water mark in transformations.

The lack of employee benefit vendors was only one of many observations made by our team. Stay tuned, as tomorrow we highlight some of the other observations our team uncovered at the Expo.