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November 3, 2009

After spending 4 days at Workday Rising, tongue still a bit red from the vast amounts of Kool-Aid being digested, it’s time to report what we heard, saw, and felt at Workday’s 3rd annual user conference.

 
First, some quick facts about Workday, reported by CEO and Chief Customer Advocate, Dave Duffield:
• Current Number of Customers (coming into the conference):  104
• Workday Rising 2009 Attendees:  161 people from 65 customers; 75 from partners; 140 from prospects, deftly named “future customers”; 130 Workday employees
• Current Workday employee count:  390
• Dave’s goal:  “have the happiest customers on the planet”
• Dave’s conference objectives.  Attendees should leave feeling:
    o “My company made a fabulous choice”
    o “Workday is delivering exceptional service and trying to improve”
    o “Workday listens to our feedback”
    o “I can be part of a revolution!”

After speaking with several current customers and many prospects, it’s clearly evident that Dave’s short-term goals were achieved.  The customers left very eager to tackle new initiatives. I heard several customers very excited about new functionality with Absence and Projects, as examples.

 
I’ve been to several conferences thrown by several vendors. The executive teams across all of these vendors typically say the right things, but what struck me at Workday Rising 2009 was that there were actions to back up the words.  Dave, Aneel Bhusri, Mike Stankey, and the rest of the Workday executive team were not only approachable, but they all went out of their way to engage with customers and partners. Perhaps this type of behavior is why Workday’s customer satisfaction rankings increased from year-to-year across every single category.

 
Speaking of Mike Stankey, there were several articles and blogs published upon his hire last month. As Workday’s new President and COO, he’s the real deal. In conversations with Workday employees, they comment that he’s already made some moves and set new policies internally to prepare them for growth. And grow they will. While there’s no outwardly committed customer growth number, Workday is publicly suggesting growth targets approaching 75% to 100% per year.  It doesn’t take my old HP 12 calculator to figure out that the current number of customers will appear miniscule in just a few short years.

 
I wasn’t the only one at the conference with the feeling that Workday will start to explode (in a good way) in 2010. With SaaS becoming more mainstream, Workday’s pace of innovation, its position as the only core HCM system of record in the SaaS space, proven executive team (with new additions), jacked-up employees & partners, and fierce customer loyalty, I’ll gladly take bets against anyone who says they’re not ready to take a BIG step forward.

 
Hats off (or given our new “We Put the Work in Workday” campaign, perhaps I should say “Hard hats off”) to Workday for a very successful Rising 2009. To quote one Workday customer, “You had me at Octopus on a stick”.