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.

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

SalesForce Update

Techcrunch has the news from Salesforce.com:

"Salesforce.com will undergo its seasonal Summer ‘06 upgrade on Monday and has released information for the first time about a developers component at their annual users conference.

This year’s Dreamforce conference will include a sub-conference October 9-11th for Web 2.0 developers interested in moving out of the consumer sector and into bringing applications to market for business use.

The Summer ‘06 seasonal upgrade of Salesforce will see general enhancements and include the following highlights:

• SAP integration, a means of connecting on-premises SAP databases with web based Salesforce.
• Partnerforce, a system for managing resellers.
• Scripting module, as in scripted dialogue not program scripts, for use in scripting customer interactions through a series of logical steps for categorization.
• Service entitlements, a feature for managing service levels as appropriate for your customers of variable degrees of ritzyness.

The company is also announcing that it has now seen 10,000 customer installations of 280 applications through its AppExchange, a community for outside developers seeking to integrate with Salesforce."

IMHO: Well, well, well. Marc Benioff keeps upping the ante, doesn't he? Salesforce is once again making all the right noises. A big concern with SaaS so far has been the inabilityto integrate with on-premise solutions and extensibility. They are now trying to fix that. They are trying to involve the developer community, which is a great move coming after AppExchange for getting people talking about the technology (they already are, and it can only grow louder). Scripts and Service Entitlements, well, those are pretty standard feature of most SFA/ CRM solutions. But it demonstates that Salesforce is thinking about gaps and fixing them. Lets see how these are in action. The interesting question for me is: Will we see an on-premise version of salesforce? Any bets...?????

Category:Salesforce, SaaS