Since Workday publicly appeared on the scene in January 2006, it has been self-described as a “revolutionary application platform and the next generation of business applications to drive your enterprise’s performance,” with applications that will be “dramatically easy to use, be responsive to your organization’s changing needs and will significantly lower your total cost of ownership.”
The sales pitch from Workday, which was co-founded by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield his former vice chairman Aneel Bhusri following the contentious acquisition of the PeopleSoft by Oracle, sounds similar to what SAP is saying about its mid-market A1S product due in 2008 and Oracle’s Fusion applications, which the company said is a “vision” for the next-generation of enterprise technologies, applications and services that will revolutionize business.
All of the three are based on Web services, focus on ease of use and deployment and will address mid-market customers (with needs beyond Quickbooks) who have more flexibility to engage a new platform than the larger enterprises deeply invested in the previous generation of ERP systems from the now much consolidated market.
On demand, software-as-a-service is also part of the story and business model across the vendors to achieve better economics and less complexity for customers. What makes Workday think that it can turn ERP on its head or side, as salesforce.com has done with CRM in enterprises, or that the startup company can outsmart SAP and Oracle over the coming years?
That’s not exactly clear, although starting from a clean slate and adopting the latest technology concepts, from on-demand services and in memory databases to tagging and SOA, is an advantage, especially if the company is well funded like Workday.
Workday has 120 employees, a growing cadre of customers and is starting to shed more light on its core, differentiated technology. The company is actively looking to move beyond its on demand HRM (Human Capital Management) roots, with the announcement of its release of Workday Financials, which it claims “delivers an entirely new model for helping companies manage revenue, resources, and financial accounting, while effectively measuring business performance.”
Rather than siloed buckets of data and the rigid code block structure of traditional accounting systems, the core of Workday’s new model is event-driven and uses tags to help glue pieces together into coherent snapshots of business activity.
Today, Workday is delivering the first on-demand alternative to ERP, with a new generation of solutions designed to meet the needs of today’s dynamic and global businesses. Built on a completely new model, Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Financials use the most modern, standards-based technologies to provide an unparalleled level of agility, ease-of-use, and integration capability.
