Dave's Workday

PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield's new venture, Workday, has just released a new product, an HCM solution based on the SaaS model. From the press release:

"About Workday:
Taking a fresh, modern approach, the company aims to provide mid- to large-sized companies with a compelling alternative to traditional enterprise software.........

Workday Enterprise Business Services are comprised of four suites of services, the first of which, Human Capital Management, is being announced and is generally available today(6th November). The subsequent suites—Workday Financial Management™, Workday Resource Management™ and Workday Revenue Management™—will be rolled out beginning in 2007. All of the Workday Enterprise Business Services share a common foundation:

• On demand: offers web-based delivery, multi-tenant architecture, 24x7x365 availability, and enhanced security
• Agile and Global: quickly adapts to meet your changing business needs
• Intuitive: built for today’s generation of information workers; offers native reporting and analytical tools to help businesses make more timely and informed decisions
• Built-in Auditing: enables tracking of all changes for governance/compliance purposes
• Web Services Integration: offers out-of-the-box, standards-based integration capabilities, minimizing complexity and implementation time

About Workday HCM:
Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), the first service to be offered by Workday, is an on-demand solution that helps businesses dynamically align their people and organizations to adapt to fast-changing business strategies. With Workday, organizational changes that typically require weeks or months of IT support can now be done independently in hours or days by authorized business managers.

Built around a flexible organizational model and capable of managing all types of workers, Workday HCM addresses key functional areas such as Staffing, Compensation and Performance Management and is generally available as of today, November 6, 2006."

IMHO: Well, haven't we heard this before? Sounds very similar to the pitch of all ERP, and specially SaaS, vendors. But Workday already has a couple of customers (Biosite, and KANA software, both Calif.-based companies), and has signed up a few more. The way Workday is trying to differentiate itself is by eliminating the need for developers to go from RDBMS to what they call an Object Management System and back. Here's more on this. Let's hope that, at least technologically, Dave gives us a product as satisfying to work with as PeopleSoft.

Oracle Releases new WebCenter

From ZDNet:

"Oracle announced today WebCenter Suite 10g R3, which it describes as a "next-generation user interaction environment." It will deliver task-oriented, contextual, multi-channel interactions for information workers, bringing Web 2.0 technology to the enterprise," according to the press release. And, it's part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware. Not only that, Oracle WebCenter Suite is licensed as an option on top of Oracle Application Server Enterprise Edition for $50,000 per CPU.

....The demo of WebCenter given {this morning} at OracleWorld was impressive, with blogs, wikis, threaded discussion, widgets, instant messaging, search, VoIP, RSS and mashhups all rolled into one application development environment. However, two key components–WebCenter Composer, for creating and customizing the application user interfaces, business rules, profiles and policies, and WebCenter Spaces, which allows individuals and groups to collaborate and manage projects–are not available in the first release."

An attempt to bring Web 2.0 technologies to the Enterprise through the Fusion platform. For me, there will be limited impact of this addition to the stack, mainly because there are a lot of cheap options available for people trying to collaborate, like JotSpot. Maybe we'll see it bundled somewhere.....

SaaS Snippets

Am back after a long lay-off. Here are some relevant snippets:

SalesForce Winter Update: SalesForce announced Dreamforce (registeration required), which included the launch next year of its custom development platform called Apex. Apex is a SQL/ Java based proprietary language, which will allow customers to deploy there own code customizations on SalesForce. It is an interesting development, and one which pushes the SaaS model even closer to a hybrid with on-premise. Details of how this will be managed in a muti-tenancy model, as well as how upgrades and such things will work are still lacking though.

Oracle On-Demand: Staying with SaaS, Oracle announced the launch of On Demand offerings on PeopleSoft Enterprise suite, and Siebel CRM. Appears to be a watered down version of their on-premise software, the pitfalls of which have been well documented. Remains to be seen whether their self-proclaimed "leaders in on-demand" tag holds up.

Will try to keep up with regular postings. Keep visiting for updates....

Update: Netsuite has announced SuiteFlex, it's own version of a development platform. SuiteFlex is targeted at Service providers, developers and VARs, and allows building of vertical-specific functionalities and business processes. In addition, NetSuite has also launched SuiteSource Directory, a source of free, open-source Suitelets hosted on Source Forge. Well, these SaaS guys really know how to make things interesting....

Category:Oracle, Salesforce, SaaS, CRM

Oracle briefing for Investors

Oracle hosted a briefing for investors on July 18. Some thoughts:

• Oracle reiterates its commitment to develop further all acquired product lines. They provide timelines for general availability and what can be expected of the releases.


• There is no comment on Oracle’s foray into OnDemand and how it plans to attack the SMB space and take on Salesforce.com and NetSuite.


• Nothing new on Fusion applications, or how the development is progressing. But there is demonstrated movement on leveraging the capabilities of Fusion middleware with new application releases having close integration with BPEL, XML Publisher, Customer Data Hub and the like. IMHO, the whole application family is moving closer together and we may yet come to a situation where all modules will be hot-pluggable and inter-operable.


• Some impressive numbers on Fusion vs NetWeaver, and the usual noises about how SAP is still proprietary and Oracle is moving to open-standards. They do deliver integrations with SAP products though.


• SOA was a recurring theme as a growth driver. But demonstrated benefits through the use of SOA are still lacking, IMHO. In fact, I have not heard of a single large scale SOA deployment. SOA’s true potential can only be realized through large scale deployment and the network effect. I have written about this here.

The presentation is here. Notes on the event by James Woodrow also point out the Q&A that took place after the presentation. Vinnie has penned some questions here.

Category:Oracle, Analysis