“Marriages don’t last that long!”
So said Dave Duffield, co-founder of HR Cloud provider Workday and former CEO of PeopleSoft, of his Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri this week and the length of their working relationship.
Duffield’s comment came on the opening day of the Workday Rising user event in Las Vegas, a gathering that took place against the backdrop of Oracle’s dramatic acquisition of RightNow. That announcement was accompanied by a seeming shopping list of future potential Cloud purchases headed up by HR and talent management providers.
But it’s reasonably safe to assume that Workday won’t be the subject of being absorbed into Oracle. It’s privately-held and it’s hard to imagine either Duffield or Bhusri succumbing to Oracle’s wooing – Duffield was bitterly opposed to its takeover of PeopleSoft a few years ago.
That said, Workday has worked its way into Oracle’s target sights, causing the larger firm some pain by targeting all the old PeopleSoft customers with a Cloud alternative. It’s telling perhaps that the first releases of the long-awaited Fusion applications from Oracle are HCM modules rather than the anticipated CRM ones.
So with new funding in place and the prospect of an IPO next year, it was an upbeat Workday team that gathered in Vegas with a general mood in the air that this was a nexus point for the firm that launched back in 2005. Duffield cited a recent customer survey which he said returned 96% positive marks for Workday. He said:
Such customers are exemplified by the likes of business information company Thompson Reuters which has 55,000 employees across 100 nations and became a Workday customer in August.
On the agenda for discussion was the December update to Version 16 of Workday which will feature 174 new features, including upgrades to its financials module that will enable the vendor to "run the workloads of the largest companies in the world," according to Bhusri who cited its abilty to run payroll for up to 100,000 workers as evidence of this enterprise-class functionality:
Workday 15 integrates the system with Salesforce.com's Chatter enterprise social-networking service and with Microsoft Outlook; a series of talent-management enhancements including a Career Interests module that allows employees to express their career goals and aspirations; a connector to third-party payroll systems; and improved financial analytics. Stan Swete, Workday chief technology officer, said:
Also on show was an alliance with another Cloud newcomer Zuora which will see Workday’s HR and financial applications integrated with Zuora’s subscription billing and commerce services. Luke Braud, vice president of Products and Engineering at Zuora, said:
Along with a similar deal with performance management Cloud firm Tidemark, such alliances are indicative of how Workday plans to flesh out its portfolio. Mark Nittler, vice president of applications strategy at Workday, explained:
There’s also another more prosaic reason for such partnerships, summed up nicely by Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo:
It’s sound thinking. Earlier this week Angela Eager of research firm TechMarketView warned that Oracle’s takeover of RightNow was only the beginning. Workday might not be a likely target in its privately-held current status, but one day it might find itself on the receiving end of Larry Ellison’s cheque book. As Eager noted, there is safety in numbers:
Workday is getting to that certain size and its success among the PeopleSoft installed base is such that it certainly irritates, if not entirely threatens just yet, the dominant player. The Cloud HCM space in 2012 promises to be a highly competitive marketplace.
