The yearly Workday Rising conference is coming upon us - a key event for Workday, customers and the overall HCM market... All eyes in the HCM world will be on Moscone Center from September 9th to 12th, and with that Workday has earned the attention of a whole industry and market.

Time to get some topics out there that we would love to have answers for after this week.

[This post is trying to follow the structure of my May blog post about What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire... that, if interested - you can find here.]

The Future

Workday has done a superb job to achieve its market position and overall recognition. And it has for the first time laid out major innovation pieces coming in the future with Recruitment and BigData Anaytics. It the near time it will be key to understand how these projects are going, what they will deliver and what the road map on top of these deliverables look like. And more longer term - if Workday will share what similar large investment areas there maybe going forward. More horizontal functional extension in HCM, more vertical functionality, more Financials functionality - maybe a surprise? 

My hope is that the company will continue to chart a course similar to the e.g. BigData Analyticcs timelines for similar large and strategic initiatives - something all enterprise software vendors are inherently uncomfortable with - but something that bides a market  leader well. Anyone remember how Siebel kept the ecosystem in its breadth by the march through the six generations of CRM?

 

More sweet Suite?

Recently Workday has ramped up its messaging on the benefits of running a modern, cloud based integrated HCM and Finance system - and the benefits are on hand (see e.g. Mark Nittler's excellent post here) - but the argument may also play into the hands of even larger automation owners like e.g. SAP, Oracle and Infor. 

Nonetheless this is a move in the right direction in my view and it will interesting to see what innovative and differentiating argument - maybe from a unique HCM perspective, the higher ground for Workday - we will hear this week.

 

What Clouds will it be?

Workday has done a great job on evangelizing the benefits of the cloud and putting most of the competition on their heels on the topic. But Workday also built their in house technology to run their cloud apps - something that may become a concern both from a modernness and viability perspective. 

Therefore I saw the unintended communication at HP OpenWorld on Workday allowing to run development and test systems on Amazon's AWS as a very good proof point and key industry support. It remains to be understood, what keeps Workday so far to not officially run on AWS as production system. And along the same lines it will be interesting to hear Workday's plans to  learn  more about plans and architecture to deploy to different public clouds (e.g. HP's). And maybe we could even see large customers pressure Workday to an inhouse deployment on an OpenStack cloud? 

 

In Memory

We are seeing SAP spending a good amount of change on getting the HANA message out. Less known is the fact, that Workday has been deployed on an in memory object model right from the start (see Curt Monash still valid review here). No need to make noise about it from Workday's perspective then - but now would be the time to share experience and learn from in  memory computing (e.g. before also Oracle jumps on the bandwagon as expected in 2 weeks at OpenWorld) epertise and establish a strong differentiating positioning for in-memory architecture.

 

Next Generation Recruitment

Workday has certainly raised the ante on their upoming recruitment product. We hope to learn more about the upcoming functionality and hope that Workday will use this opportunity to build recruitment from bottom up newly in 2013 to truly differentiate themselves from the existing bread and butter functionality. 

Designed for mobile first is the claim, and we expect that to be delivered - but we equally expect a thought leading way how to deal with social media beyond Chatter. And not just for the travolging aspect social for recruitment - but for the overall product suite.

 

Payroll

From what we can see Workday gets dragged into providing payroll functionality more and more as a product deliverable, as seen with the recent announcement and confirmation of the UK (2015) and France (2016) payrolls. And while the company has done a very good job with interfaces and partner programs - at the end of the day larger international customers - Workday's sweet spot - would like to have this critical piece of information delivered from their vendor - with no potential finger pointing on integration, compliance and payment issues. It will be interesting to see if this ultimately will lead to a rethinking of the Workday in product supported payroll scope.

 

BigData / Analytics

One of the other larger product development deliverable of Workday that's on the horizon, is their Big Data Analytics initiative. For the data part the traditional transactional vendors usually chose a co-existence model - keep their transactional data in one silo, and the no-sql data in another and let the magic work in between. For the analytics aspect I am really game to hear more on the implementation - I am hoping for not the faux analytics - where it is used as a new marketing buzzword for reporting - but the real analytics - the one that recommend or even take an action (Read more here).

With Workday's object model though - there are other options to build this - and they could become true value drivers for its customers and products - let's hope we will learn  more in this area at Rising.

 

Momentum

Workday comes off a stellar quarter - and it will be interesting to see how customers, partners, the whole ecosystem feel about the performance and about the next quarters to come. As known, Workday not only needs very good execution to the product side (that we focused a lot on in this post) - but needs it equally on the go to market, partner development and enablement as well as customer success side. And that across many more geographies. We look forward to see and learn how the company handles the good problem of growing very fast - one of the more strategic overall topics we plan to keep a keen eye on. 

 

Vision & Thought Leadership

Workday has done very well in this category and haunted competitor s by mini bus loads- effectively becoming the though leader and company to beat. But we are reaching now a point - with the advent of recruitment and BigData functionality - where the company needs to charter it's next chapter. This Rising conference maybe too early still, same for the HRTech conference in a short 4 weeks from now - but we would hope at least for some glimpses and  maybe the testing of some basic directional messages. 

 

MyPOV

Market leadership does nothing more than bestow high expectations of its bearers. Combine it with a significant amount of thought leadership and the expectations go even more up. User conferences are a key indicator for the health of both as they can move the needle even more forward - or show signs of less of pressure on the gas pedal. 
 
No question it will be an interesting 4 days - looking forward to it. 

[Update 9/9/13 - Workday correctly pointed out that their initiative is not only around BigData - but analytics too and called Big Data Analytics. Happy to correct that and even more add the analytics angle to the post - that somehow escaped me - thanks Geoff!]

 

Business Research Themes

Future of Work, Tech Optimization

Roles

Chief People Officer, Chief Information Officer

Tags

ceridian, workday, hcm, sap, oracle, infor