Workday - more info

Here's some notes on Workday that were sent to me today. This is a really interesting company that I am anxious to get more details on as their launch firms up.

Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield spoke at the AMR conference today.

They didn't really talk about what workday would offer but here are some of the items they did talk about:

Today's ERP systems are outdated and they can't be re-architected.
Solutions need to address the following needs: info workers, fluid orgs and new technologies. 

3 principles of the next gen ERP:
1 flexible BPP - open workflow and bpel
2 ERP used by everyone - internet style UI; targeted to operational side of business, personalized, tight integration to desktop (mentioned Office 12 and Sharepoint)
3 native use of key technologies

Adaptable systems
Think about: pda's, VOIP and search-oriented navigation

Marc Andreeson is involved

Architecture: SOA, leverage open source components (not wholly open source - not key to what they're doing - pass on savings to customers), configurable UI (separate UI from underlying transactions)

Not SQL or relational - organized around XML documents
Doing pure definition development - trying to solve the programming dilemma

Multi-tenant is a given - must be both hosted and on premise

Dave's daughter runs marketing and his son runs sales.

Launch will be in April timeframe.
35 people - 25 are ex psft
Greylock is an investor
Still working on pricing - would like to charge a lot for the software but it's cheap to own

Comments

[Stephan Schwab]

I don't know if a browser based ERP application is such a good thing. AJAX is nice, but I don't feel everything needs to be cramped into a web browser. Why not try to improve the UI of desktop applications and link that to SOA architecture? ERP is not something you use occasionally like most webapps.