Aneel Bhusri of Workday comments to The New York Times show the confidence in one of the locker rooms I described in “Halftime in Enterprise Tech”
The Workday I.P.O., Mr. Bhusri said, completes a four-part model of cloud-based enterprise software. The first cloud, exemplified by Salesforce.com, he says, concentrates on customer-facing software, like sales and customer collaboration products. The second, occupied by Workday, looks inward to the processes that run the business.
An information technology automation cloud, which Mr. Bhusri says is dominated by ServiceNow, is the third element. ServiceNow went public in August. A fourth cloud would consist of business- and industry-specific applications developed by independent consultants and in-house engineers.
“From a customer standpoint, if you can get the best of breed from each, throw in Google for e-mail and documents, how is that not better? How is a large vendor going to compete?” Mr. Bhusri says.
Some would argue he is a bit casual about the fourth cloud, but in reverse you could argue that most industries have morphed significantly in the last decade and the industry solutions of the incumbents don’t give them much of an edge.
Like I said it should be an interesting second half.
