Workday

Posted by admin on August 1, 2011 under ERP Software, HCM Software | Be the First to Comment

Workday is a cloud based Human Capital Management (HCM) and financial/ERP software solution that has a lot of momentum in the market right now. Founded in 2005, they have grown rapidly and now have over 600 employees. They currently have 200 HCM installations and 12+ financial/ERP installations.

But in order to really understand this product, you need to understand it’s history and close relation to Peoplesoft. After Peoplesoft was acquired in a hostile takeover by Oracle a few years ago, Dave Duffield (the founder of Peoplesoft) left Oracle and started Workday. He wanted no part of Oracle and saw this as an opportunity to start fresh with a new solution based on the up and coming cloud environment. With a new software offering, he would have no legacy install base to maintain and could develop the product on the latest technology. In fact, many Peoplesoft veterans now work for Workday.

Workday is following exactly the same model that Peoplesoft used 20 years ago in the early 90’s. The strategy is to provide a Human Resources (Human Capital Management) software solution and then move into the financial/ERP software space. Basically this product is a PeopleSoft sequel!

Workday is built on an open source technology stack that includes Linux, MySQL database, Java, and Tomcat. Because they are fairly new, they are still building out functionality – especially on the financial/ERP side. As a cloud solution, they promise (and this is included in the contract) that they will be up and running 99.5% of the time. Workday requires a 3 year minimum contract commitment and a typical implementation cost is 1.25 times the annual cloud subscription cost.

Like Peoplesoft, Workday focuses on larger companies with a stated target of at least 1500 employees. They are focusing on going after companies that have a traditional HCM or ERP software solution that would like to move to the cloud.

We are watching Workday closely with our software evaluation clients and it will be interesting to see if they will be able to start taking market share away from the larger traditional vendors such as SAP and Oracle. Much of their short term success will depend on the general market adoption of cloud based solutions. On the HCM side, outsourced solutions have been offered for many years, making cloud based software very viable. Workday should be able to make inroads into that market quickly. On the other hand, companies have been slower to adopt the cloud model for ERP and there are fewer true cloud based solutions. While this makes for a more difficult sell in the short run, this also offers an excellent opportunity for Workday to penetrate the ERP market when (and if) the market turns toward the cloud model for ERP.