News

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.

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!

Detroit folks: MiPro is co-hosting a breakfast seminar with Workday about the increasing attention to the on-demand model of business application delivery.  If you’re in the area and would like to attend on the morning of Tuesday, October 8th, we still have space.  Workday will be there to explain its version of on-demand means, and Christine Ferguson, VP of HR Strategy at Workday, will give a demo of Workday’s HR and Payroll solutions.

The location is the Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, MI, and if you haven’t been there before, it’s the hotel.  It’s impressive.

Again: we have space and would love for you to come.  If you’re at all interested in what Workday is and what Dave Duffield has been up to, click below to learn more and register for the event.

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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Quite a bit, actually.  This is one that you should look at deeper than the headline.

Last week, Appirio announced that it bagged Series B funding upwards of $5M by Sequoia Capital.  It’s worth noting that Sequoia is the same firm that underwrote upstarts such as Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and PayPal.  The pedigree is Midas-esque in its strength.

Jeff Kaplan of THINK IT Services nails it in a smart piece entitled The Market Implications of Sequoia Capital’s Funding of Appirio:

Many analysts and trade pub reporters have questioned whether there is a role for consulting and professional services in the SaaS market. There is no question that traditional professional services firms such as Accenture and CAP Gemini are still searching for the right way to scale down their methodologies and costs to fit the on-demand services market. However, Appirio’s revenues have grown more than 400% in the last three months, during which over 1500 customers in 80 countries have adopted its on-demand solutions.

In other words, the SaaS consulting market, as a market differentiated from blue-chip ERP/enterprise IT consulting, has been financially validated.  This isn’t “so-and-so customer chooses so-and-so SaaS vendor, so check out how SaaS is maturing.”  This is an order of magnitude stronger than win stories or market buzz: this is $5M of real dollar validation by an investment firm that has a history of picking winners.

Here at MiPro, we continually are trying to refine our methodologies, delivery timetables and cost structures for our on-demand (Workday, Authoria) clients.  We know the SaaS market is a different animal entirely than, say, our mainline PeopleSoft ERP practice.  On the macro level, it’s good to see the validation Kaplan suggests from a broader market vitality perspective.  In a more subtle level, it makes me proud that we are working in the exact same direction as some of the biggest names in SaaS/on-demand consulting.  Cool stuff.

If you made it past the long headline and would like to come talk to us in person, we’ll be at the Quest Northeast conference this week from July 16 through July 18 at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods in Ledyard, CT.  We’re in booth 208 and would love to hear from you.  Come on by!

(All of this assumes you can get away from the gambling tables, of course.)

Phil Wainewright:

Enterprise software giant SAP has lost one of its brightest software-as-a-service stars to SaaS titan Salesforce.com, I can exclusively reveal. Steve Lucas, who spearheaded the development of SaaS at Business Objects, acquired by SAP last year, left the company at the end of June and began work straight away at Salesforce.com, where his job title is (bear with me, it’s quite long): senior vice-president of platform marketing, AppExchange and Force.com.

Salesforce.com arguably has the most impressive collective vision of where SaaS will go from here.  This is particularly validated by all-star pickups like this one, as well as Erin TenWolde, who also recently started at SFDC.

It will be interesting to see how SAP adjusts its SaaS roadmap in the wake of Lucas’s leaving.  If this is true:

Lucas is proud of what has been achieved at Business Objects, but he said that SAP’s ability to make broader progress with SaaS is stymied by the lack of a central vision for the model. “SAP doesn’t have a SaaS strategy,” he told me. “They don’t have a single piece of paper that states what their SaaS strategy is.”

…then SAP might be rudderless in terms of SaaS for quite some time.

Must be the season for social-engineering spam, because if you thought this was bad, get a load of what just showed up in my inbox:

This is a well-done ploy on many counts: it appears to be from the IRS, implicates my employer, looks official, and logically follows tax season. The attachment, a Word DOC, was opened without incident on my Mac, but the document showed an embedded object foreign to my operating system (OSX Leopard), so there was no issue.

Deeper research shows that it quite possibly might be a trojan horse that installs a virus; if you read the comments in the previous link, you’ll see different delivery mechanisms. Some are PDFs, some ZIP files, some DOCs. Regardless, it seems as if the object, regardless of its wrapper, installs some sort of malicious payload.

Be careful. This ploy was clever enough to get past SpamAssassin, so I’d guess most antispam definitions don’t have this one in their tables yet.

If you’ve received anything like this, post it below so others can understand what’s floating around out there.