About Workday Financial Management Solutions

Since Workday publicly appeared on the scene in January 2006, it has been self-described as a “revolutionary application platform and the next generation of business applications to drive an enterprise’s performance,” with applications that will be “dramatically easy to use, be responsive to an organization’s changing needs and significantly lower total cost of ownership.”

The sales pitch from Workday, which was co-founded by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield and his former vice chairman Aneel Bhusri, following the contentious acquisition of the PeopleSoft product line by Oracle, is very close to what SAP is saying about its mid-market A1S product due in late 2008, and Oracle’s Fusion applications, which the company said is a “vision” for the next-generation of enterprise technologies, applications and services that will revolutionize business.

Workday’s solution suite, like SAP and Oracle, is based on Web services, and focuses on ease of use and deployment, geared primarily toward mid-market customers (with needs beyond Quickbooks) who have more flexibility to engage a new platform than the larger enterprises deeply invested in the previous generation of ERP systems from the now much consolidated market.

On-demand, software-as-a-service is also part of the Workday story and business model as it works diligently to achieve better ERP economics and less complexity for its customers.

Well funded and poised to make a significant impact in the ERP financial management space, Workday has 120 employees, a growing base of customers, and is starting to shed more light on its core, differentiated technology. Notably, the company is moving beyond its on demand HRM (Human Capital Management) roots, with its much-awaited release of Workday Financials, which delivers an entirely new model for helping companies manage revenue, resources, and financial accounting, while effectively measuring business performance.

Rather than siloed buckets of data and the rigid code block structure of traditional accounting systems, the core of Workday’s new model is event-driven and uses tags to help glue pieces together into coherent snapshots of business activity.

Workday Key Strengths

• Technology: Workday technology has three core components: an Object Management Server (OMS) instead of a traditional relational database; a user interface that is separated from the system logic; and an enterprise system bus to facilitate integration.
• On-Demand Delivery: Workday on-demand solutions provide an order of magnitude savings in total cost of ownership versus traditional on-premise applications. What’s more, with Workday an organization has access to the most current and innovative best practices being delivered on a regular basis.
• Packaged: Workday offers a growing number of common integrations to solutions such as payroll. These connections are managed by Workday as a service, and the company plans to continue to add to this portfolio.
• Customers report that Workday makes it easy for everyone—from employees to power users. Its navigation is more intuitive than existing systems.
• Workday’s business services start with a single, role-based approach to security. Because the solution puts the worker at the center, Workday determines authorization for user access and system access to services based on the role or roles an employee has as a system user.