The big news in the SaaS space today was Walnut Creek, Calif.-based Workday Inc.'s release of the beta of Workday Financials. The company calls this the first on-demand alternative to ERP and an entirely new model for helping companies to perform ERP functions while also measuring business performance. The particularly interesting aspect of Workday is it's promise to do this all on-demand with the SaaS model, requiring no hardware, installation, upgrades, et cetera. In the press release, Workday president Aneel Bhusri had this to say:
Workday is bringing together the lower cost of ownership of Software as a Service with our deep domain expertise in enterprise business solutions to deliver an on-demand alternative to ERP. While ERP requires complicated integrations and bolt-on additions to deal with changing business requirements, Workday is built from the ground up to support todaya�s agile enterprise, and our modern architecture means we can continue to adapt and extend our solutions to meet customer needs for years to come.
Bloggers at ZDNet had some interesting comments on the release. Dan Farber of ZDNet's Between the Lines blog pointed out the similarities between the company's claims and SAP's promotion of its upcoming A1S product, as well as Oracle's claims about Fusion. In his analysis, Farber looks closely at Work Tags and how it could possibly be differentiated from SAP's planned A1S effort. Phil Wainewright of ZDNet also weighed in on Workday's Financials suite. Wainewright wondered whether the company's hype about its ERP approach was a bit overblown and went further into the challenges of ERP and whether Workday's new approach that breaks away from a fixed database structure will ultimately make for an easier day's work in enterprise resource planning.
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