Business Two Zero

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Remember JBOPS? - there’s a new dawn with Workday.

by David Terrar @ 22:22 on November 6, 2006.

There was a period back in the 90s when the major ERP players were collectively called JBOPS - JD Edwards, Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP. JDE and PeopleSoft have been swallowed by Oracle, and Baan has disappeared without much trace. In the late 90s Baan went on an acquisition trail to try and compete head to head with SAP, even acquiring our friends at CODA for a couple of years, but subsequently were acquired themselves by UK industrial controls company Invensys, and then SSA Global Technologies, who were subsequently acquired by Infor. I guess on paper Infor must be the number 3 enterprise software company in the world, but it has a large array of overlapping, legacy ERP products (including BPCS, PRMS, Max, Marcam, InterBiz, Baan, Infinium, Epiphany, SunSystems, Pegasus, and Mapics) in a complex portfolio, a little like the Computer Associates of some years ago.

Echoes of the JBOPS reappeared today. Dave Duffield, the founder and personality behind PeopleSoft’s rise to fame in the 90s, which started with a strong HR presence, and then blossomed in to a fully fledged ERP offering, launched the Software as a Service company Workday today. Although initially focussing on Human Capital Management, they are positioning themselves “a new day for enterprise software - Enterprise Business Services“. Dan Farber of ZDnet’s Between The Lines described their launch call:

“The old breed according to Workday

Designed for business processes of the 1980s and 1990
Difficult to change
Built for back office/administrative use
Transaction driven
Focused on legal and compliance tasks
Built for a single enterprise
Costly to implement, customize, maintain, and upgrade
Choked by lengthy implementations and re-implementation
Difficult to get data in or out
Expanded globally as an afterthought
Legacy systems wrapped with new technology

The new breed according to Workday

Designed for how business works today
Easy to change as your business changes
Built for the business user
Event driven
Focused on goals and plans
Built for networked, global business
Software-as-a-service
A quick time to value
Simple to use, easy to integrate
Global at the core
Built natively with modern technology

The new breed described above sounds similar to what every other on demand software company, at least from a marketing pitch, claims to be doing, drinking from the chalice of multi-tenant, SOA, Web 2.0, ESB, event driven, etc.”

In Information Week, there is a more generalised positioning of the Workday solution, but including some intriguing passages quoting one of their early adopter customers, Biosite:

Medical device maker Biosite has been testing Workday’s human capital management service for several months and is close to switching its legacy HR systems over. During testing, the company asked Workday to bulk up certain security features, such as improving how passwords are structured and how the service’s user “roles” provide access to employee data, says Suzy Zoumaras, Biosite’s head of worldwide human resources. No data is more sensitive than employee information, she says.

Biosite will likely replace its on-premises Pivotal CRM system with on-demand apps within two years. But echoing others we talked to, she expects that it will take longer–at least five years–for Biosite’s management to warm to the idea of replacing the company’s core JD Edwards financial system with a software-as-a-service alternative. “Financials are very different. They’re very integrated with the business,” she says.

This last comment seems to be slightly at odds with the Workday “Enterprise” oriented message, and even seems a little in conflict with Suzy’s earlier quote where she is happy to entrust her most sensitive data to the company. In any case, I’m sure the entrance of this new player will be good news for the SaaS topic. I would expect there will be some very good analysis of their product and direction over the next few weeks from Jason, Jason and the others.