Larry Dunivan of Lawson and Andrew McCarthy of Workday organized for me to talk to a few of their respective customers at the HR Tech show in Chicago last week.
Here are some reasons I heard for the decisions to go with Lawson or Workday:
- Lori Simpson at Geisenger Health cited Lawson's developing their Compensation module to be a close glove-like fit to their own variable, revenue driven comp model as an important consideration (Larry has an interview with her here)
- Matt Prise at Life Time Fitness cited Workday's superb user interface as their major decision driver
- Kristin Ferrara at Inverness Medical Innovations cited Workday's flexibility to handle the significant pace of acquisitions they are making.
- Lanny Sperry at Spectrum Health cited their existing comfort with Lawson - they were already customers of financial and other modules.(Larry has an interview with him here)
- Debra Warren at HB Fuller cited the workflow advantage in Workday which made her reviews a snap.
See the pattern ... not one of them cited SaaS as the driver. No, Harry Debes - don't get too excited. It is increasingly the default deployment model for Talent management. No need to call out the obvious.
Debra did gush over her SaaS economics. She has a "budget-neutral" deployment - the savings from decommissioning their Oracle functionality is funding the Workday project.
I told her I wanted to license her funding model. I have a feeling 75,000+ Oracle and SAP customers may want to take a peek at a budget-neutral migration model :)
