They Key to ERP in The Cloud: Move at The Speed of The Web

This week, BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner sat down for an exclusive talk with Workday ERP co-founder and co-CEO Aneel Bhusri, and took to his ZDNet blog to share some of the highlights. Bhusri, a former strategist at Oracle’s PeopleSoft, likens the two companies, and also expounds on how—Gardner feels—Workday is outlining a roadmap to the future advantages of cloud computing. To wit: fly at the speed of the web.

Workday’s strongest similarity to PeopleSoft, says Bhusri, is that this ERP provider is also working to adapt to a technological shift. During Bhusri’s tenure the move was from the mainframe to client-server. Now companies are making the shift from on-premise to SaaS, and this upheaval might be more prevalent than the aforementioned shift. Furthermore, Bhusri feels that Workday is innovating where larger companies have ceased to do so, noting that ERP has been around for about 15 years and needs a definitive facelift.

Bhusri admits that Workday’s current relevancy might not have been possible without the economic downturn, but notes the company remains relevant by “building at web speed.” Currently Workday users are updated every four months to the most current version of the system. For the coming months, Workday seeks large and global organizations—those with the most to gain from the on-premise to cloud computing switch.

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