Dave Duffield Putting In An Honest Workday...

As I mentioned the other day, I didn't attend the AMR 21 conference this year, and for the most part, from the reports I've seen from friends and professional colleagues, I didn't miss all that much [the big platform guys touted themselves, the SaaS guys promised they really were revolutionary not evolutionary...like I said, nothing new.]

However, I am somewhat bummed that I missed out on Dave Duffield's first major public discussion of his new company, Workday. I had mentioned in my 2006 predictions that Workday would garner quite a bit of attention. How could I be so confident in a company that's essentially in stealth mode? Because of Duffield.

Long-time industry observers know that Duffield is about as well respected in the industry as you can get. First, he founded a trio of successful companies [Integral Systems, Information Associates, and Peoplesoft]. Second, with each company he drove even greater success. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Duffield is beloved by a great many of his former employees [something that most definitely can't be said for Ellison, but we all knew that].

One of my partners [who really isn't a tech guy] asked me a few weeks ago, "What does Duffield have left to prove?" While I understood the logic behind the question [Duffield is already a billionaire], the question in and of itself belies an understanding of what drives a man like D.D. The day Oracle successfully acquired Peoplesoft after a public fight against the takeover, er, merger...Duffield lost to his arch-rival. As a shareholder of both companies at times, I'll not speak to whether I agreed with the merger at the time [what's done is done], but if you had to map out a probability tree of likely outcomes, I guarantee you that "Acquisition by Oracle" was the least preferable to Duffield.

So getting back to Workday, here is the RBMS [Really Big Mission Statement]...

Workday™ will provide a revolutionary application platform and the next generation of business applications to drive your enterprise's performance. Our applications will be dramatically easy to use, be responsive to your organization’s changing needs and will significantly lower your total cost of ownership.

A lofty goal, but any less lofty than the declarations of Marc Benioff or Shai Agassi or Chucky Phillips? Granted, Workday is a no-revenue, no product company, but no one can question the management team's ability to execute on a plan, in a hurry.

So what do we know about Workday, and what incremental details did I miss out on learning at AMR 21? Below are some of the data points available with a little scouring, with special thanks to Jeff who shared some detailed feedback from AMR 21 on his blog.

• Duffield co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri, an ex-Peoplesoft guy who was a GP at Greylock since 1999
  • According to Jeff, Greylock is an investor [I would imagine Duffield won't be taking much VC money, why would he?]
• From their website mission statement, they're taking direct aim at "traditional" ERP systems and architecture
  • Today’s enterprise applications are no longer meeting the needs of their customers
    • Are too expensive to deploy and maintain
    • Are complicated and difficult to use
    • Were built for the back office and largely ignore the informational needs of the line manager
• Looking past the aforementioned RBMS, Workday wants to build a new series of ERP applications driven by today's most promising technologies [multi-tenant, open source, XML/AJAX/AHAH, hosted delivery]
  • From Jeff, data-schema will be XML driven, not SQL or relational
  • From Jeff, Open-source a means to an end [i.e., just to make it cheaper to develop, pass savings onto customers]
• It remains to be seen which areas of functionality Workday will release initially, but majority opinion favors human resource and payroll functionality [which was Peoplesoft's strong suit in the early days of ERP proliferation]. But theoretically, a SOA-architected, hosted platform built from the ground up should allow the roll out of myriad functionality quickly [both from Workday and an ecosystem of partners a la salesforce.com's AppExchange and Reardon's EBS Commerce Grid].
  • From Workday's job postings it looks like they're tackling more than just HRMS functionality in the early going
    • Human Resources Application Development
    • Financial Application Development
    • Supply Chain Application Development
    • Tools & Technology Development
• Marc Andreeson [creator of Netscape, founder of Opsware] is involved
• Duffield's daughter and son are involved in marketing and sales management, respectively
• Planning launch of product/service offering in the "April time frame"
• Currently running at 35 employees, 25 of which are ex-Peoplesoft

There's obviously a lot of steps between now and Workday becoming a major disruptive force in the enterprise applications market, but watching Duffield and his team try will be interesting to say the least. I can't help but wonder if Duffield would be evangelizing the "traditional ERP is dead" mantra if he was in fact still in charge of Peoplesoft as a stand-alone company, but if he wasn't spearheading Workday, I'm sure Aneel and other Peoplesoft execs would have similar designs.

Related Articles:

• San Fran Business Times: Online Concierge wants to be your indispensable tool
• Jeff Nolan: Workday - more info
• Vinnie Mirchandani: Feeling  Half-full at Half-Moon Bay

Note: At the time of this writing I and/or funds I maintain discretionary control over may have maintained long equity positions in any or all of the companies mentioned but did not maintain a short equity position in any of the mentioned firms.

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Comments

[jeff]

Jason,
I would imagine the Greylock investment, if true, is a concession or fulfillment of obligation to Greylock's limited partners in light of Bhusri's involvement. I can only what clauses those agreements (Greylock, Bhusri, LP's) contain.