Workday

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.

Dave Duffield is the guest on tomorrow’s Bill Kutik Radio Show (hosted by our friends at Knowledge Infusion).  Listening to Bill is entertainment enough, adding Dave to the show makes this a can’t-miss event.

A few years ago, while at the HR Tech Conference, I had the opportunity to attend an interview session with Dave that was moderated by Bill.  This was during the very first days of Workday.  It will be very interesting to hear Dave’s view of software, HR applications, and the SaaS space now that Workday has a few years under its belt.

A bit about the show….

Workday CEO and Chief Customer Advocate Dave Duffield will be featured on The Bill Kutik Radio Show, airing Wednesday, September 17 at 12 p.m. EDT. Dave is a recognized pioneer in enterprise software and human resources (HR) technology and the founder of five companies including PeopleSoft and Workday.

To tune in live, click here: The Bill Kutik Radio Show. The Bill Kutik Radio show is also available as an iTunes podcast.

About The Bill Kutik Radio Show
The Bill Kutik Radio Show is a bi-weekly talk show featuring Bill Kutik, one of the leading independent analysts in the HR technology marketplace. Bill’s show features unedited and unrehearsed conversations with industry leaders, including practitioners as well as executives for some of the world’s leading technology providers

Hope you tune in!

BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm’s insightful piece about Workday absolutely nails what we are hearing ourselves from our customers and prospects:

Ever since veteran software entrepreneur Dave Duffield launched his new startup, Workday, a year and a half ago, people have wondered if it could become the next Salesforce.com (CRM). Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s chief executive, had shaken up the customer-relationship management software world and created a company with a market cap of $8 billion with an online service that replaces expensive and complex traditional software packages. Could Duffield and Workday do the same? Just now, there’s growing evidence they can.

Workday has landed three large companies as customers—important votes of confidence that it can be trusted to handle some of a corporation’s most crucial computing tasks. Flextronics (FLEX), the biggest of the three, plans on rolling out the Workday human resources management system worldwide for more than 200,000 employees in the next two years. “Workday could definitely be the next Salesforce.com,” says David Smoley, Flextronics’ chief information officer. “Their model is in line with companies like us. We want to keep things as simple as possible and keep costs as low as possible.”

The other major customers are Chiquita (CQB), with 25,000 employees, and Life Time Fitness (LTM), which plans to adopt all three of Workday’s services, adding accounting and payroll to human resources management.

If Workday does a good job of serving these clients it will gain credibility with large corporations that are looking for alternatives to traditional software packages. “They’re in the phase where they’re getting big customers. If they do well with the rollouts they’ll get the attention of a lot of mainstream corporations,” says analyst Jim Holincheck of market researcher Gartner (IT). David Dobrin of B2B Analysts is even more effusive: “Workday is like the iPod for enterprise HR software. It’s a better and simpler way of doing things, and people can see it.”

Right now, ERP and SaaS have a (relatively) symbiotic relationship, even within the same enterprise.  But SaaS is clearly the emergent, progressive concept (intelligently discussed here in what is must-read reading for anyone interested in the space) and will likely attract an increasing number of devotees — eventually at the expense of in-house software.  ERP certainly has its strengths, but the SaaS model is becoming more validated every day, which accelerates the maturity/acceptance curve.

(thx Jeff)

Internally, we’ve talked about doing videos of things ranging from the instructional to the campy.  Check out what our partner Workday did with their American Idol spoof, below.  The editing is actually very good.

Dave Duffield is a master of culture-building, among many other things.  Good to see the PeopleSoft-in-its-glory energy resurfacing here.

Joshua Greenbaum’s recent article had a few good points that I’d like to reiterate, especially as they relate to Salesforce.com’s (SFDC) struggles to get its growth to the next stage.

SFDC is struggling to find the next big thing for itself, and Greenbaum says organic development frameworks/guidelines ain’t cutting it.  Greenbaum, via Cowboy 2.0, suggests that Force.com software partners are having the ground rules changed midstream, and draconian development and platform guidelines are denying otherwise viable 3rd-party apps.  In this quest for platform and value control, Greenbaum asserts that SFDC is terminally limiting its capability for organic expansion into a broader niche.

[...] the scuttlebutt at this writing is that he has: SFDC is pulling the plug on a number of existing partners’ efforts to build on Force.com, largely in an effort to protect SFDC’s turf and stifle interesting new apps that don’t fit the development model (ie. our way or the highway) of Force.com. It’s obviously SFDC’s prerogative to limit its PaaS play to whomever it likes, but closing the door on potentially worthwhile apps that are not built on native Force.com technology (the gist of Cowboy’s problem with SFDC) is a move to limit the scope and influence of Force.com at a time when SFDC can’t really afford more limits on something that is showing very limited results already.

The next stage of speculation is logical: if organic platform development efforts are faltering, then infusion is needed.  And infusion, in this sense, means acquisition.  While this might seem a logical decision path when internal technology investment dollars aren’t getting the job done, often they’re a deal with the devil.  Yes, you acquire new technology, new value and new customers, but does it take your concept — your platform — to where it needs to be?

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