OK, it could have been just me. I drove to Rising and parked for the duration. No airports or highways to worry about. Unusual week for me. I was certainly in a relaxed state of mind.
However, I noticed it wasn't just me.
Could have been Jerry Seinfeld who kicked off the event. Unlike most stand up comedy these days, he did not invoke any politics or use any foul language. The crowd continues to be amazed by his observational comedy about every day life. Like why do restaurants feel the need to announce daily specials? If they are so darn special, should they not be on the menu? People were talking about Seinfeld days later.
Or it could have been Harry Potter's magic. Instead of some loud rock band, Workday had Universal Studios open up a glorious Orlando October evening as a thank you to the Rising audience.
Perhaps it was the vendor feedback. Many loved the layout at the Orange Country Convention Center which brought lots of foot traffic to their booths. The startups in the Workday Ventures floor space were cheerful talking to me even on the last morning when usually roadies are packing and shipping their stuff.
Maybe it was customers who love that Workday continues to mature features like the Skills Cloud and surprise them with Procurement, Planning and other new features even after 33 releases of the product. And also keep them buzzword compliant. This event was big on machine learning with features like the Accounting Center, Discovery Boards and People Experience. Blockchain in the form of credential technology and the WayTo mobile app shared with event attendees. Unlike other vendors who recruit partners by the hundreds to develop on their Cloud Platform, Workday has been developing apps with a handful of early adopter customers like Flex and Sun Life before the planned GA next year
Or it was the omnipresence of CEO Aneel Bhusri. User conferences are hectic for vendor executives, but Aneel was remarkably accessible. He took photos with several attendees. I introduced him to several much to their delight. Earlier in the year, he had promised to make more time for analysts. He delivered that in q&a and less formal settings.
Workday stock took a hit during the event with the fear of slower revenue growth. That did not appear to faze Aneel. I certainly see all kinds of wide open white space for Workday. Even after two decades of cloud computing, industry and geographic coverage is spotty — by my estimate, less than 20% filled. After 20 years, over a million on-prem customers continue to use ECC, BusinessOne, Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, Lawson, Baan, Microsoft, IFS, Sage and Unit4 products on-prem, with no benefits of multi-tenancy, machine learning or other contemporary innovations. They continue to be Workday prospects. Importantly, unlike with some other vendors, people actually like doing business with Workday. Even more importantly, Workday leadership has been steady, if a bit conservative.
Perhaps it was all of the above, but I found myself thinking of the late Glenn Frey quite a bit during the event. Yes, that relaxing, peaceful, easy feeling.
