|
Wow, there has been a lot of Workday press this month! They successfully broke into top-tier firms Flextronics and Chiquita - the biggest SaaS deal to-date, and their products sound innovative and cool. It's been a long time since I've attached the words innovative and cool to Enterprise products. Not that everybody is optimistic, and it's appearent they have a uphill battle to compete in this space. But I give them better than average odds. Everybody just likes Dave Duffield. ZDNet's Phil Wainewright has this to say: Most traditional business software revolves around transactions — the movements recorded in purchase orders, stock movements, bills of materials, invoices, journals and every other document that has evolved to record business operations over the past several centuries. But this is a roundabout way of representing reality that has evolved through historical happenstance. Modern computing can track real objects and the events that happen to them as they move from make to ship, or from order to pay. Workday’s new release of its financials business management application, announced yesterday, illustrates this principle in action.
Frank Scavo says : Workday is the latest high profile attempt at establishing an enterprise-class solution on an on-demand platform, this one specifically for human capital management (HCM), with functionality also rolling out for financials, purchasing, and payroll. The projects at Flextronics and Chiquita have just begun, and success is not guaranteed. But if successful, they will offer an existence proof that SaaS adoption is moving up-market to large organizations.
Larry Dignan says: So what about this tipping point? Two thoughts: First, the Flextronics deal is clearly a tipping point for Workday, the brainchild of former PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield. In fact, Workday really resembles PeopleSoft in its early days. PeopleSoft specialized in HR and financials. So does Workday. The founding father is the same person. And both companies had good timing as they were founded just in time for a shift in the software model.
Systematic HR raises a valid point: The core areas of Workday’s HCM application (like the org structure and the core technology and UI) are great. However, as they move into sales and marketing, the demand for their applications seems fairly high, and customers are beginning to demand more traditional functionality. As buyers buy, they like the idea of a very innovative application, but they feel that they need the old functionality they have always had. Workday is now in the situation where they wanted to do something very cool and different, but are needing to meet the realities of customer demands. What will their talent management applications look like? Will they have the opportunity to create something new and amazing (the way Taleo did) or will they cave to the cries of the customer?
Dennis Howlett has other concerns: The customers Workday is winning - it has 40 - are those that want to get off Oracle/SAP. Until now, there hasn’t been a choice that offers enough of an overall compelling package to make the switch. As Larry surmises, Workday is in the right place at the right time, which is more luck than judgment.
Guess I'll have to wait and see before launching that "Workday Corner" blog! In the mean time, check out these videos: Clip 1: Intro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHBwaJLhaR4 Clip 2: Global http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U3SsC2jqdo Clip 3: Upgrade http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8-LSfNKVXw
Comments () |
 |
|
|
|
 |
