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 your enterprise’s performance,” with applications that will be “dramatically easy to use, be responsive to your organization’s changing needs and will significantly lower your total cost of ownership.”

The sales pitch from Workday, which was co-founded by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield his former vice chairman Aneel Bhusri following the contentious acquisition of the PeopleSoft by Oracle, sounds similar to what SAP is saying about its mid-market A1S product due in 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.

All of the three are based on Web services, focus on ease of use and deployment and will address 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 story and business model across the vendors to achieve better economics and less complexity for customers.

What makes Workday think that it can turn ERP on its head or side, as salesforce.com has done with CRM in enterprises, or that the startup company can outsmart SAP and Oracle over the next few years? The company thinks that adopting the latest technology concepts, from on demand services and in memory databases to tagging and SOA, is an advantage, especially if the company is well funded like Workday.

Workday has 120 employees, a growing global customer base and is starting to shed more light on its core, differentiated technology. The company is moving beyond its on demand HRM (Human Capital Management) roots, announcing the beta release of Workday Financials, which it claims “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

• Workday Talent and Performance Management allows companies to manage the talent of a global, diverse and mobile labor pool by bringing the flexibility, ease-of-use and significant cost advantages of the Workday on-demand HCM service environment to workforce expertise management.
• Corporate governance, a global platform, agility, performance measurement, integration capabilities, and consumer-Web usability are built in to Workday’s solutions from the start. Workday is the alternative to today’s cumbersome enterprise applications.
• Workday customers cross industries, sizes and requirements -- from large enterprises including Chiquita Brands, ITT Defense, Life Time Fitness and McKee Foods to rapidly expanding companies such as CareerBuilder.com and Inverness Medical Innovations.
• Two of the leading software-as-a-service providers, Salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies, have also chosen Workday as their on-demand HCM provider.