I have been asked 10 times in the last two days by Workstream customers, "What should I do now?" Curious about what most people think the answer should be..
I'd say "hang tight." Can't imagine Empagio/Workstream won't continue to support current customers, especially since their applications don't overlap (as far as I know) so the redundancies likely to be eliminated will probably be in the back office. At least for now.
Although I don't think I owe Jason Corsello any money, he certainly beat me -- and all the analysts I read -- in correctly predicting the company merging with Workstream. Though you left out the third possibility in your headline -- dumb luck -- I think he was smart.
It will be interesting to watch the two companies try to integrate their offerings since Empagio is also a roll-up. Its most famous product is Tesseract, the 30-year-old mainframe HRMS with a truly great payroll. IBM still uses it!
I wouldn't want to be Workstreams head of development, Mike Gioja, when he tries to integrate that dinosaur with his own new SaaS TM suite. But maybe he won't have to, since Empagio says they are building a new payroll app. Another fun job in HR technology. Just ask Workday, finishing theirs.