Why is Workday important in the market?
Workday was the first SaaS company that actually designed their solution.
Once again, like I said, for the worker not thinking about the HR department and the finance
department first.
... What Workday did is Workday actually reimagined those processes, put them online with the
worker being the center of it, and then having HR and finance be there to consume that data
and to use that data in a way that drives business decisions.
We have to think about the experience; the experience of the worker at the core, and
I think that’s just a different design principle that was from day one at Workday.
So, you were talking about placing the customer at the center of the world, and I’m really
interested in the corporate cultural dimensions of that.
Why didn’t earlier software companies take that step
Workday truly does have a unique culture, similar to the PeopleSoft culture, which Dave
will say, puts employees first.
Every other company will talk about how they put customers first.
Workday says “Employees first, because if employees are happy, they will make our customers
happy.”
And the fact is, at the last rising, Aneel announced that they got a 98% customer satisfaction
rating.
They got a 98% customer sat., and I would challenge any software company in the world
to meet that!
Customer satisfaction, or net promoter scores and the ERP space are notoriously terrible.
And they’re terrible because either the products were a whole lot more expensive and
more difficult to implement than anybody actually believed coming in, or more importantly, the
vendors have such a notorious culture going for after their own customers doing what an
attorney friend of mine calls “shale fracking,” they try to go in there and break up the wallet
of the customer and get every little drop of money they can out of them.
The fact that people get a lot of good, new functionality quite frequently and that the
vendor is maintaining that version of the code for them, instead of their IT department,
you’ve got customers that are very happy because they never have to wait on their own
internal IT department to implement this backed up technical data.
So it’s great!
Workday emphasizes its platform.
It’s not the only software company to do that, but it really presents the platform
in a central way.
So, what is the importance of platform?
It predominantly uses a number of open-source technologies, which gives them an incredible
cost advantage over competitors.
They can scale and add customer, after customer, after customer and they owe no additional
fees to some third-party systems software company.
Number two is the platform only really has to support one technology stack and one set
of code.
… many of their competitors have multiple different product lines that they’re supporting.
In some cases, one vendor has promised to support old applications on the old platforms
in perpetuity.
That just adds cost to the vendor.
Cost, you’ll have to get eventually passed down to the consumer or the customer, They
don’t have that.
They’ve got one stack, one set of technologies.
And the architecture of this stuff, to run predominantly in memory.
So now, they’ve run all these additional extensions so that the product line can support
other types of data, not just structured, heavy order kind of database transaction and
information.
The other thing that’s impressive is with their object-oriented programming, it makes
them very nimble in creating new applications as for instance, they just created a video
function which will be used in learning.
... And then they immediately said, “Well, after we’ve used it in learning, we’re
going to put it in recruiting.”
And I haven’t seen other vendors be that nimble when they create new functionality.
And Workday does that all the time with reusable pieces.
It allows HR finance to have much more control over how its processes and tools work, and
allows IT to be much more strategic in how it supports the enterprise.
I think that right there is the holy grail of the platform.
Focusing particularly on HCM and financials for the moment, what are the advantages of
having them integrated into a single platform?
The newest application from Workday is called simply Planning.
And it for the first time for them, incorporates elements of HCM and finance into one application.
And, it makes perfect sense, I mean, how can you be deciding to hire X number of people
without knowing the financial repercussions of that?
We live in a world today where employees don’t work in modules.
The workforce doesn’t work in modules, the workforce works in processes, and the only
way to integrate processes together truly, is if they’re in a single platform.
We can interface data all day long, but to integrate processes to create a seamless experience,
that is hard, hard stuff.
And it’s something that people shouldn’t discount.
Whether it’s Workday or any of these tools, when they think about platforms, why should
things be in one platform?
An integrated experience is key.
Businesses today should never be buying a bunch of little best degree stuff in the finance
and HR area, unless it’s for some peripheral, small add-on piece, and here’s why: Moving
forward, what businesses want out of a toolset is they want a single place to find operational,
financial, human capital, as well as big data and a whole bunch of other external stuff.
Unfortunately, in a lot of companies, they’ve got 20-30 years of experience building what
I would, if I could use the British term, a “dog’s breakfast,” lightly, loosely
integrated, spreadsheet-ridden junk.
And so, you’ve got blatant piles or islands of data, stuff that’s being pumped into
spreadsheets, and manipulated, and re-pumped back into something else, and that’s in
the existing finance and HR world.
And then when they try and go shop for new software, God help them if they recreate that
same, loosely-interfaced kind of world together, when what they really need is they need to
get as much integration as they possibly can from a core provider of all the ERP stuff
they can get, because they’re going to have to now connect those technologies to weather
data, to geopositional data, to smartphone data, and to a million cloud solutions that
are powering their employees’ mobile devices among other things.
But what’s really important is these tools rely on data.
And what Brian is saying is if we’re going to use these sexy new tools, some of the shiny
objects, I have to have data in a single place so those tools can consume it.
And I think that’s what we’re going to see more and more, as people look at a platform
like a Workday or another one of these SaaS tools, so they can make sure that this data
is right and then take it to the next level of service in Workforce.
What advice do you have for people in the enterprise who are looking at these products,
I think there’s a lot of introspective work going on with a lot of aging out boomers,
who are looking at some of their finance operations and asking themselves, “Have I been a good
steward of the company?”
And if they haven’t they’re going to be looking at new technology, because they cannot
keep continuing with all of the stuff that may have got them through the recession, but
isn’t going to get them going any further going forward.
I think that what’s really important is that organizations look at right fit versus
future function.
I think we spend way too much time on future function, and we spend way too much time on
RPs, I think we spend way too much time on saying is this vendor, is this vendor, is
this vendor ready?
... I think what’s most important is how am I … I’m basically renting someone to
move into my house.
That’s a weird way to say it, but I’m renting someone to move into my house.
And as I do so I’m going to be like, “What’s it going to be like to live with them?
Do I have the ability to sustain them?
Do I have the staff to sustain them?
I mean, there’s so many different things to me that tie into the solution other than
future function.
The counsel to those companies is always try and get as much as you can through the core
vendor.
I think that because this topic was Workday, I think Workday has changed the enterprise
software space forever.
I think there were a lot of doubters at first.
I think it changed the space, and it’s made the space a whole lot better, as far as how
it’s working with customers.