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Workday 13 Update
Workday provided a preview of the latest product update, Workday 13 at the end of April. This appeared to be a major release of functionality across their entire ERP suite including Workday HCM, Workday Payroll, Workday Initiatives (Work Management), Workday Financial Management, Workday Spend Management as well as some new user experience capabilities.
This was the first update we have received in about two years so it was really impressive to see how much progress the company has made not only with their products but also with their overall business. Here are some key facts:
- 200 customers and more than 130 of them are live
- Flextronics have over 100,000 employees using their systems
- Over 1,000,0000 employees are using their various products across their customer base
- Targeting an IPO for the second half of 2012
- Releasing about 3 updates per year, compared to 1 every 18+ months for their ERP competitors
Workday HCM
New capabilities include compliance functionality related to the new US healthcare regulations which will touch benefits, employee data as well as compensation. These HCR regulatory changes also have a major impact on workforce cost so Workday is also delivering functionality related to better managing salary data for benchmarking, compensation and overall manager decision support.
As I mentioned, the last time I saw a Workday product demonstration, they didn’t very much in the way of talent management functionality but that has really changed. They now have compensation planning, performance management, succession planning and competency management. They have wrapped these capabilities in a robust in-line analytics and decision support framework. This framework includes pre-packaged reports and some really slick user interfaces for workforce management. This screen shot is of their 9-box interface for their succession planning product. What I thought was really cool is how they have integrated their position management and organization charting capabilities right into this 9-box interface for their Talent Matrix. These capabilities look very competitive to most of the other leading SaaS TMS players in the market.
For capabilities that they don’t currently have in the their talent management products like recruitment they will continue to partner with leading specialists like StepStone (now Lumesse) who acquired MrTed and Taleo.
For learning management they have built an intelligent interface into Plateau (recently acquired by SuccessFactors).
When they demonstrated the Workday 13 product, the one thing that popped out at me was the user experience and how engaging it was. The user interface appeared to quite flexible, allowing the user to drill down, or across to access important information, as well as the use of compelling charts, graphs and dashboards. I thought it was interesting to see how an object oriented architecture can really impact the overall usability of your SaaS products.
Workday Payroll
For an ERP system it is very useful to provide a payroll solution to tie into. Workday’s product has been built from the ground up to be a SaaS-based payroll solution. Workday Payroll was launched in 2009 and supports US based payroll requirements. The news for Workday Payroll is a new partnership with OneSource VHR for payroll co-sourcing services such as payroll settlement, tax and garnishment administration. These are common requirements for organizations with very large workforces.
Workday 13 still offers integrations into third-party payroll providers and payroll aggregators such as Patersons and ADP.
Workday Mobility
Seems like every HR software company is now offering a mobile application for users. The news in this area was the announcement of limited availability of Workday for the iPad. Again, one of Workday’s strengths is user interface design and this product is no exception. The product is not intended for heavy transactional use but more for the executive or manager that wants to easily browse through talent profiles, monitor their Chatter-like personal Workday Workfeed or gain insight into their workforce by running a report or analytics. The general availability for Workday for iPad is planned for Workday 14.
Overall, I thought that the Workday 13 release contained some useful improvements and the product is really impressive. Given their 3 times a year release cycle, they will continue to innovate at a brisk pace which will be difficult for the traditional ERP competitors to keep up with. Also, their laser focus on usability will also become a huge differentiator when looking at incumbent solutions, as long as Workday can deliver the necessary functionality and security that enterprises are going to continue to demand.
Seems like we were just here a few months ago but a lot of things have happened since the last Oracle OpenWorld in 2009.
It was great to see a full house of exhibitors that consumed most of the Moscone center in San Francisco. Walking through the two completely full tradeshow floors, which indicates some degree of growth in the broader technology market, especially after I saw a number of mega-booths with a lot of promotional events.
Fusion Applications
I didn’t see the Sunday keynote with Larry Ellison, but I heard multiple times that he announced everything at that session. It appeared that area that SaaS followers were keenly interested in learning more about was Fusion and as one analyst mentioned to me it, ‘Larry mentioned a couple of the new Fusion Apps and then went Yada Yada Yada for the rest of them.’ His opinion was the anytime you Yada Yada anything that means you are not taking it seriously. Well maybe.
It sounds like Oracle is taking Fusion serious, having invested close to $4B in R&D during 2010 alone, in order to be ready to launch these next generation apps. Oracle is offering 100 modules and over 7 different product families including Financials, Procurement, Sourcing, Project and Portfolio Management, HCM, CRM and SCM. We will see over the next few days if there is real detail and deliverables around all of this investment in Fusion or just more Yada Yada.
If Oracle plays this correctly, they will be able to cash in on the buying public’s shift to OPEX spending rather than traditional capital spending on software, which is no longer in vogue. Fusion applications could be a viable alternative to smaller more risky best-of-breed application alternatives, but they need to be both pure-SaaS and functionally complete. We will know over next few days.
Riding Hurd
I personally think that Oracle’s hiring of Mark Hurd was a true master stroke, and a major mistake on the part of HP for letting him go. Mark kicked off the Monday keynote session and he looked like he had worked at Oracle for years, brimming with confidence and very comfortable. It is also clear that having someone with his knowledge of the hardware world at the helm, is a major advantage, with all of the Sun technology now firmly part of the Oracle ‘Full Stack’ offerings.
We saw a fully buzzword set of presentations this morning; OLTP, Petabyte, threads, cores, and ZFS to name a few. Speeds and feeds were the name of the game and Mark Hurd and John Fowler discussed the new Exadata 2 and Exalogic products. Oracle loves fast products and breaking records, so owning the entire technology stack is going to be fun for Larry. It is interesting that all of these really fast “Full Stack” products will be huge advances and will definitely improve the performance and scalability of future Cloud Computing services, offered by Oracle and others.
M&A in the Air
There have been a number of deals in the technology space over the past 30 days including HP purchasing both 3PAR and ArcSight for close to $4B. In the HCM space there have been a very rapid spat of deals including one announced between SumTotal Systems purchasing Softscape, Taleo purchasing Learn.com, Kenexa buys Salary.com and Stepstone picks up MrTed. One has to wonder if there won’t be a big announcement at Larry’s Wednesday afternoon keynote. I have heard that Oracle might buy Netsuite, which is interesting considering that Larrry already owns about 65% of the company. Considering Salesforce.com is speaking and exhibiting here at OpenWorld that might be sort of embarassing to everyone concerned. It might also not be a ringing endorsement of Fusion either, but we will wait and have to see what happens.
More from OpenWorld tomorrow.
Company: eQuest
Started: 1998
Located: San Ramon, California
Geography: Global
Market: Human Capital Management – Recruiting and Job Boards
Products: eQuest Job Posting Distribution
eQuest OFCCP Compliance Job Posting Package
eQuest P2 (Prophesy2)
eQuest P3 (Prophecy3)
Key Customers: Hewlett Packard, Johnson Controls, Starbuck’s, Liberty Mutual, Home Depot, AT&T
Website: eQuest
Recent News:
eQuest Extends Agreement with Taleo Business Edition to Provide Ongoing Global Job Posting Support
MrTed and eQuest Release Job Posting Delivery Services through SmartRecruiters
I asked John Malone, eQuest’s Chief Executive Officer a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2009.
Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
Yes – actually, prior to it being called SaaS. eQuest’s technology and business models required this type of functionality to best integrate with the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and ERP markets and to give customers increased flexibility.
Supporting daily job board data formatting changes is like shooting at hundreds of moving targets at once. SaaS was the only option for this type of business.
Why do your customers buy from eQuest?
We have a proven service that our ATS and ERP customers trust. With the present recession, budgets for hiring are naturally being reduced and companies want to make sure that their recruiting dollars are being spent at the most effective career sites. Our metrics and analytical software tools, like Prophesy 2 and 3 can make on-the-fly evaluations of the site’s effectiveness prior to posting a position.
Clearly companies find this a unique capability and an invaluable tool as part of their reason for using our services. In fact, we recently won the 2008 HR Executive’s Product of the Year award for Prophesy 3, our innovative job board evaluation tool, which is the first solution that allows a recruiter to follow a candidate all the way through the hiring process from posting the job, to their first view on a job board to the final hiring.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
Simplicity as a Service (SaaS)
Most corporations are becoming increasingly frustrated with the long deployment cycles, high costs and complicated upgrade processes demanded by traditional software applications. These are common complaints about the large traditional software providers.
Software as a Service (SaaS) has become one of the fastest growing segments of the IT sector, because it provides customers with software solutions that can be implemented quickly, while avoiding the incremental infrastructure costs traditional with on-premise applications.
What is your outlook for 2009?
New opportunities in 2009 include global expansion - opening offices in Europe and Asia; continued feature enhancements to our existing technologies; and plans for introducing some exciting new products. We are expanding in new sub-sectors of the market and expanding customer base through new partnerships around the globe.
Thank you to John Malone for contributing to this profile.
Crazy like a fox.
With the economy in such tough shape, with customers on the sidelines with no budget to buy software, maybe now is the perfect time to embrace a Freemium software strategy. This concept was originally proposed by a venture captialist named Fred Wilson, the founder of Union Square Ventures.
This became really clear to me over the past 6 months that this trend towards free software might be the future. Initially I read a great article entitled Free! is the Future in Wired magazine (make sure you watch the Chris Anderson video), which I thought presented a very clear argument for free.
Think of all of the free software and services business models that went bust during the Internet Boom. But then again there have been many businesses that were built using a free business model including Google, Yahoo!, Skype, eBay, and Craigslist just to name a few. Some of the new kids on the freemium block include Facebook, LinkedIn, SimplyHired, Kijiji, 37signals and many of the open source software players.
My second realization of the power of free was using 37signals BaseCamp project management product. It was a great example of providing a free product that you liked so much that you had to buy into their paid version. If you need a project management tool, this one is worth a subscription and you may end up pulling out your credit card like me.
Then my third reason why I thought freemium could really be the future of software is based on working with a great company, MrTed, who makes Applicant Tracking or ATS software for large companies. MrTed just recently launched their new Small and Medium business freemium offering, SmartRecruiters, which is an Open SaaS product, which is a mashup of Open Source and SaaS business concepts. This Open SaaS model was developed by Jerome Ternynck MrTed’s CEO and founder. SmartRecruiters like many other freemium offerings is based on the development of a strong and passionate user community, who ultimately become the revenue engine for these companies. SmartRecruiters will monetize their business model by offering a collection of value-added services that are bundled with their free software.
As companies look at their 2009 business strategies, they need to balance gaining marketshare while keeping customer acquisition costs (CAC) as low as possible. By deploying a freemium software strategy now you might be considered crazy in 2009 but be laughing all the way in the not too distant future.
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