Workday’s Mary Hayes Weier:

No question, SaaS integration is a work in progress. But there’s a lot happening in this area, and it’s getting easier all the time. And the benefits of SaaS seem to far outweigh any integration challenges companies face. As R “Ray” Wang noted, it’s typically the third thing his customers ask about, after first asking themselves why they didn’t adopt SaaS sooner.

The biggest mistake we hear in enterprise-level software discussions is polemic language about SaaS (or ERP) that suggests a decision to go down one road naturally and thoroughly precludes the other.  This is where you get the forum and Twitter debates about SaaS and its virtues that border on near-religious fervor: because some vendors paint it as an either/or proposition.

Nothing is that simple, especially when it comes to enterprise backbone applications.  Workday has been saying all along that the smart enterprise uses SaaS and ERP in coexistence, and helps its clients understand where integrations are necessary.  Every Workday deployment includes its Enterprise Service Bus (from its CapeClear acquistion), because it’s unrealistic — not to mention unfair — to suggest SaaS is a silver bullet cure-all for every enterprise business function.  Data integration, data delivery and information transfer are alpha priorities for any enterprise IT team, and Workday knows that full well.

If you talk to anyone who speaks in absolutes and hyperbole about a new technology and how its going to obsolete the old guard, you need to be very careful.  While SaaS has a ton of momentum and is clearly cracking may enterprise IT spaces, it needs to coexist — intelligently, happily — with on-premise software.  Smart SaaS vendors like Workday have been saying this all along.

Read Weier’s entire post over at Workday’s blog.

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This is a story about how SaaS has completely tipped on its head the preconceived notions of enterprise software implementations, even for veteran consultants like me.  Put another way, it’s a story of new school v. old school.

Workday — for whom we’re an implementation partner and a customer — introduced a delivery group called the Solution Center.  This team takes a customer from scratch to go-live in as little as month (average deployment  timeframe is an unbelievable 90 days).  Even though that premise is astonishingly powerful, one needs to understand – truly understand – how radically different this approach is from the mainstay ERP mentality.

The Workday Solution Center leverages Workday’s Rapid Application Deployment [PDF link] approach, something we’ve embraced here at MIPRO as a result of being a Workday customer.  The mantra of this approach is deploy, optimize and extend.  Each deployment starts by leveraging a rapid prototype.  This first model is designed to handle the core requirements of the customer and help them achieve quick time-to-value.

The idea behind the Solution Center team is to utilize the Rapid Application Deployment model in a centralized and structured manner.  Think of the Solution Center as a turn-key delivery approach.   The Solution Center team works to construct a rapid prototype in about a week, using the best available data they can get from the client (reports, data files, etc.).  It doesn’t have to be perfect, just something to show the client’s data in the tenant.  This rapid prototype, this foundation, is what they will use at the initial kick-off.

This approach is very data-focused.  The customer has to accept the Solution Center-tuned set of optimized business processes, and if for whatever reason they insist on modifying them, they are responsible for the configuration work.  All the implementer does is load data.  It’s streamlined and clean.

This approach encourages clients to go-live quickly and focus on incremental configuration of the full-on Workday solution.  It places a premium on cost containment and quick time-to-value.  Isn’t that one of the primary promises of on-demand computing?

That’s the new school.

From a personal standpoint, I come from the old school: given my financials background, I’m accustomed to premeditation, logic and OCD-grade project order.  I have not “grown up” with this new rapid prototype methodology, and as a result it was a major departure from what I was used to.  I learned that it has a fantastic success rate and have come to believe emphatically that it’s a necessary tool in the SaaS toolkit.  Now that I’ve worked with Workday extensively, I understand this approach far more than I did when it was first unveiled.