Workday Rising 2017 recap: Myself and colleage Holger Mueller were guests of Workday this week for its annual Rising conference and had the opportunity to speak with a host of customers and company executives, including co-CEO Aneel Bhusri. Here are some of the key findings that arose during those conversations.
- Workday has a solid base in HCM and financials, but when it comes to expanding further into ERP, manufacturing won't be a priority. But supply chain is a possibility from the order management standpoint, Bhusri said. It's also open to partners taking the reins. "If someone popped up and wanted to build a killer supply chain management app on our platform ... I would be thrilled," he said.
- While Workday is rolling out a PaaS strategy after years of speculation, it is in no hurry to become the next Force.com. Initially, the focus will be on customers and systems integrators building extensions to the core applications. “We’re not looking for an ISV to build an app on the Workday platform for probably a year," Bhusri said.
- Workday is moving some of its workloads to Amazon Web Services while maintaining its own datacenter footprint. Many customers want to remain in Workday's cloud, and the company doesn't expect the majority to be on the public cloud until between five and seven years, Bhusri said. AWS is "the right architectural decision" for Workday, particularly due to the rapid flow of cutting-edge features AWS delivers in areas such as machine learning. While Workday will call out to those services from its own cloud, over time customers may come to agree that it makes more sense to be native on AWS.
- When it comes to future mergers and acquisitions, Workday will focus on "cool technologies to enhance the platform," Bhusri said. While applications are also a possibility, Workday won't look to buy broad suites, he added.
- Workday announced the limited availabilty of Prism, the analytics service based on the acquisition of Platfora last year. General availability is set for the second half of next year. The timeframe reflects the need to work with a small set of early customers to prove out Prism's scalability, as well as to wait for important features still under development, chiefly a data-discovery toolset.
Platfora, which was based on Hadoop and Spark, amounted to more of an acquihire than a technology purchase, and thus a fair amount of engineering work was on order, Workday CTO Joe Korngiebel said in an interview. (For one thing, Platfora was on-premises and single-tenant.) In any case, Workday talked to 25 companies before settling on Platfora, which suggests the talent it acquired was indeed top-notch.
Google launches tool for the app-dev supply chain: Open source software is de rigeur for next-generation application development, but the proliferation of options enterprises can use comes with its own set of problems. To that end, Google is partnering with Red Hat, IBM and other companies on an open-source project called Grafeas. Here's how Google describes Grafeas's intentions in a blog post:
Grafeas (“scribe” in Greek) provides organizations with a central source of truth for tracking and enforcing policies across an ever growing set of software development teams and pipelines. Build, auditing and compliance tools can use the Grafeas API to store, query and retrieve comprehensive metadata on software components of all kinds.
As part of Grafeas, Google is also introducing Kritis, a Kubernetes policy engine that helps customers enforce more secure software supply chain policies. Kritis (“judge” in Greek) enables organizations to do real-time enforcement of container properties at deploy time for Kubernetes clusters based on attestations of container image properties (e.g., build provenance and test status) stored in Grafeas.
Without uniform metadata schemas or a central source of truth, CIOs struggle to govern their software supply chains, let alone answer foundational questions like: “Is software component X deployed right now?” “Did all components deployed to production pass required compliance tests?” and “Does vulnerability Y affect any production code?”
POV: Other companies involved with Grafeas include Black Duck, Twistlock, Aqua Security and CoreOS. Overall, Grafeas is targeting a crucial weakness in modern software development, wherein the vast array of open-source components give enterprises flexibility while simultaneously creating a pool of risk and uncertainty over their provenance and security. Google is aligning Grafeas with Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration project that emerged from its internal operations and has steadily gained in popularity. It's a smart idea to open-source Grafeas now and get the broader Kubernetes community involved.
Walmart rolls out rapid returns for online purchases: The customer service and returns counter at Walmart stores can be a dreary place, marked by long lines, cranky shoppers and overwhelmed workers. Walmart is looking to transform the returns experience through a new program powered by its mobile application. Here are the details from its announcement:
Using Mobile Express Returns, customers can complete the returns process in just two simple steps:
1. Initiate the Return: Using the Walmart App, select the Walmart transaction and item(s)* to return and follow the prompts to start the return process.
2. Finish the Return at the Store: At the store, fast-track through the line via the Mobile Express Lane** at the Customer Service Desk. Scan the QR code displayed on the card reader with the Walmart app, and then hand the item to the associate.
Refunds will be credited to customers’ payment account as soon as the next day, and they will no longer have to send off their product and wait days for an online return to be credited. Given 90 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store, it’s never been faster or easier to make an online return.
POV: It's a classic, timely and effective reverse supply chain play by Walmart. Moreover, it is a solid strike against rival Amazon, which is building out a store-level returns strategy through moves such as the acquisition of Whole Foods and partnerships with the likes of Kohl's. Walmart has 4,700 stores in the U.S. and for many Americans is a weekly—at minimum—shopping destination. Friction-free returns for online goods is a no-brainer, and Walmart is planning to add rapid returns for products bought in stores as well.
The bottom line is that the omnichannel retail war remains at a fever pitch, and in many cases, such as this one, both companies and consumers can end up betting from competition-driven innovation.