Business

I watched Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri kick off this year’s Workday Rising conference yesterday morning, and their stuff was spectacular.  While unfortunately I can’t give you all the cool details (I’ll let them break the hot news, and trust me, there’s some good stuff coming), I’ll take a few moments and share some high-level notes.

Dave Duffield

• Stressed keeping Workday’s commitments despite economic slowdown.  Workday continues to invest and hire.
• Drew parallel between the emergence of SaaS/on-demand and the client/server revolution that pushed big iron away from computing’s leading edge.
• Spoke about how the SaaS business model is particularly relevant in today economy.  This comes from the obvious cost savings, but also the not-so-obvious shifting of datacenter and IT operations to specialized companies.
• From a study with current customers, showed data illustrating that Workday is 50% less expensive versus legacy on-premise applications.
• 67 customers and rising steadily.
• All four updates this year have been delivered on-time to customer population.
• Reasons Dave is optimistic (but realistic) about 2009: (1) shift to SaaS gaining momentum; (2) Workday is financially stable; (3) dedicated focus on customers’ continued success; (4) experienced management team; and finally (5) customers, who are the best salespeople Workday has (seems Workday truly understands the power of word-of-mouth).

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I try to keep internal events at MiPro (mostly) away from the blog unless they’re newsworthy on a broader level, because most internal gyrations have no context to our readership and therefore are a bit ho-hum.

As an exception, I’d like to take a moment to announce a new addition to MiPro that we’re very excited about.

For the past several months, we’ve been rigorously interviewing high-end candidates for a new VP of Business Development position, and we’re thrilled to say that search has come to an end.  We’re happy to announce that we’ve just brought aboard Tom Asby to the MiPro management ranks, and if you’re familiar with Oracle, PeopleSoft or Workday, you probably have heard of or worked with Tom.

Prior to joining us, Tom was at SAP America as a Regional Sales VP, where he bagged the highest total of net new wins in the Midwest region and 2007 and dramatically increased channel revenue via an impressive program of coaching and mentoring channel partners.

Tom has already started with us to prove that he could beat the press release to the wires.  He’s still being indoctrinated learning, but he’s already running with multiple things and we can’t wait to see what he brings to our sales and business development operations.

Welcome, Tom!  If you have any questions whatsoever, remember that whoever writes the blog is almost always right.

Jeff Kaplan:

Despite the economy, election and lingering questions about whether Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is enterprise-ready, this week’s Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference drew nearly ten thousand energnetic attendees and exhibitors to celebrate the power of the ‘cloud’.
The event not only dispelled any questions about whether the SaaS movement can withstand today’s economy, it also helped to resolve the needless debate over whether there is a difference between SaaS and cloud computing.

Salesforce.com succeeded in dissolving any line of demarcation which may have existed between the SaaS and cloud computing worlds by:

• Using the terms interchangeably throughout its keynote and breakout sessions
• Unveiling a new round of cloud-based applications and platform capabilities
• Expanding its strategic alliances to include two more pivotal ‘cloud’ players

Salesforce.com’s two most significant announcements were its move into website hosting services, and new alliances with Amazon and Facebook.

10,000 attendees?  Amazing.  I think we’ve reached the tipping point, folks.  Hang on to your hats.

Related: Vinnie Mirchandani’s The Unsung Innovations at Dreamforce

There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something.

— Thomas Edison

(via Jason)

If you’re going to HRTech 2008 in Chicago this week, come by and see us.  Mainly, we just want to hear how your business is doing.  There’s a lot going on in our country right now, and we’re interested in how you’re dealing with your HRIT projects and the demands you’re hearing from your management.  Even if you’re at HRTech just to collect foam squeezeballs, come by and talk to us.

(And we’ll have foam footballs, by the way.)

While you’re visiting, cast your mock vote in our booth and enter to win our biggest raffle prize ever — a $1600 trip for two to the 2009 Inaugural ceremony.  You can even get your picture taken with one of the (cardboard!) candidates, which, as customers demonstrated at this Spring’s Collaborate 08, allows imaginations to run a little wild.

Of course, we’d love to talk to you about our nationally-recognized expertise and experience within the Workday, PeopleSoft and Authoria markets, and we’d be thrilled to show you how a consulting company can be different from what you might expect.  It’s what we pride ourselves on, and we hear it from our clients every day.

We’ll be in booth 1105.

And we look forward to talking to you.  See you there!

In the spirit of sharing our business on both general as well as local levels, allow me to take a quick second to announce that MiPro Consulting has won Metropolitan Detroit’s 101 Best & Brightest Companies to Work For for the third year in a row.  We’re doing our share of high-fiving here in the office, and smallish football rockets have been seen whipping around at velocities completely inappropriate for indoor use.  That’s mostly my fault.

But anyway, yeah, we’re geeked.

(We’ll be handing out football rockets at the HRTech 2008 conference in Chicago, Oct. 15-17.  Stop by and see us at booth 1105.  You’ll also be able to get your mock election vote on and even win a trip to the 2009 Inauguration.  Don’t miss us!)

For anyone still wondering if Oracle has let Fusion go into a black hole and innovation has stalled in the mothership, Joshua Greenbaum emphatically says no:

Perhaps the most impressive, due only in part to the huge hype riding behind it, is Fusion Applications. Oracle gave industry analysts a two-hour mind-melting core dump earlier in September on Fusion Apps and is planning on showcasing some of the new functionality during Open World on Day Three. And here’s what I can say without blowing the terms of an NDA agreement I signed two weeks ago: Oracle has made good on its promise to deliver Fusion Apps, and has greatly exceeded my expectations in doing so. A very impressive debut.

Greenbaum’s post is filled with great detail, so check it out if you’re wondering about the application and innovation details Oracle brain-dumped at this year’s OpenWorld.

From a more macro level, just yesterday our PeopleSoft Practice Lead and one of our Senior Client Execs gave a report from the field regarding their observations at OpenWorld, and the takeaway is this: there’s lots of good things happening with Oracle.  Lots of good energy.  While Fusion has taken its sweet time and shapeshifted, sometimes strangely, over the past 24 months or so, it’s come out looking better than anyone was expecting.  People notice that, and what we have here is grassroots buzz from a company that is making products that take a message to the marketplace.

The next year will be a very exciting time in the Oracle/PeopleSoft spaces.  Watch.

So I’m wrapping up at Oracle OpenWorld with Jim Borne, one of our Client Executives, where I’ve been asked to be the subject matter expert for PeopleSoft Maintenance Management.  I’ve been at the Utilities Industry kiosk, and while the name might not get you fired up, there’s been a ton of attention around the Maintenance Management offering.

(Gratuitous horn-honking: MiPro has been the only consultant involved with every Maintenance Management deployment in North America.  It’s been a fun journey and I’ve learned a lot, and I’m pretty thrilled that we’re in the position that we are.)

Anyway, in no particular order because I’m exhausted and getting ready to hop a red-eye, here are some recap thoughts of the conference:

• The Oracle Fusion applications are really coming along.  If you’re planning on being an early adopter of this stuff in 2009, you’ve gotta check this out.
• Lots of buzz about Oracle Beehive, a brand new, built-from-scratch collaboration tool.  It gives users a very slick way to communicate and work together, and does an excellent job of tying together email client, IM programs, calendars, VM and conferencing.  It does all this behind the scenes so users can easily share (and collaboratively edit) documents, emails, etc.  Pretty cool stuff.
• The show is downright huge, which, no matter how often I come to it, always sort of startles me.  All the products seem mixed-up, the grounds are confusing, and in general it’s hard to find what you’re looking for.
• The general mood is very positive: there are lots of comments and good juju about the continual improvement of the Oracle products and the future of Oracle apps.  Pretty exciting stuff.  Nice break from the dour headlines.
• PeopleSoft customers:  you’ve got to be on the lookout for PeopleTools 8.5.  There are some major usability improvements in the app itself and the web 2.0 applications.
• Mobility is one of the huge themes here, and many companies are grabbing hold of this sucker and seeing where it takes them.  Most notable supporters in this area are companies like RIM (BlackBerry), Bluedot Solutions, HighJump, DSI and tons more.  It’s going to be huge.

That’s all for now.  Off to the airport.  Will post more from BlackBerry if I get a chance.

The Story

As we approach the year-end preparation season, we’re getting asked a lot about how to close the gap in 1099 reporting compliance.  From what we can understand, there are several factors at play that you need to know about and that might re-prioritize 1099 reporting from whatever system you’re using.

More specifically, the landscape looks a little like this: the IRS is putting stronger enforcement efforts in place to close the compliance delta between self-employed/independent contractors (who, the IRS suggests, only report ~80% of their income) and W2-earning employees.  This will be done by increasing enforcement of 1099 information reporting rules.

The IRS has been hiring aggressively after a relatively tight lockdown on new personnel, and we understand that some of these people will be 1099 auditors.  While additional auditors really doesn’t mean much in the larger IRS scheme, it does serve as a call to action to 1099 workers and their associated employers.

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What is the cost of a fumbled upgrade?  For J. Crew it was $3MM in unanticipated costs which, according to J. Crew, contributed to their recently announced earnings miss of 4 cents a share.   How did Wall Street respond?  Typical overcorrection seems to be the response with shares trading 15% down in after hour activity.

Ben Worthen highlighted J. Crew’s stumble in his business technology blog in the Wall Street Journal, mentioning that J. Crew isn’t the first company to blame poor earnings results on technology.

There was a wave of businesses blaming poor results on tech-projects-gone-bad in the early part of the decade. We haven’t seen it much lately, though.

One difference: Nike, Hershey and others that had problems in the past went out of their way to blame the tech vendor. J. Crew never once tried to pass the buck. The company didn’t respond to our requests for comment, which also means we don’t know which company sold the offending technology. You can search the Web for “J. Crew” and “systems” and find the names of several companies J. Crew buys software from, but there’s not enough evidence for us to point a finger.

What strikes a chord in me in the report is that Worthen assumes that the poor upgrade is the result of “offending technology.”  Our experience however, leads me to be much more suspicious of the implementation/upgrade approach, executive sponsorship, project budget and timeline constraints, and ultimately the implementation team itself.  All too often we see companies approach an upgrade as a routine activity that can be performed easily by their staff (all while their staff stays on top of their regular day-to-day responsibilities).   Supplemental staff is reluctantly brought in via simple commodity broker staffing firms that can only provide bodies and not real experience from both a people and process standpoint.

Obviously, this doesn’t fly too often.

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