News From The Innovation Summit JOSH BERSIN [Video]

This week I attended the Workday Innovation Summit and there’s a lot to discuss. Having just celebrated its 19th birthday, the company is embarking on a major transformation. And it’s not just product innovation that’s happening, the company is greatly expanding its business model.

Workday Has Been A Product Led Company

Much of Workday’s success goes back to its focus on being “born for the cloud.” Rather than build business apps in a typical database-centric architecture, Workday developed its own object-oriented data system, integrated workflow system, and global security architecture from scratch. Nobody knew the cloud would be so big nor that we’d have “superscalers” like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon as platforms. Nor could we predict the advent of global data governance, AI, or data and apps distributed across thousands of servers.

Well Workday, led by Aneel Bhusri, pulled this off. And not only did they sell architecture, they sold “the Power of One.” In Workday, unlike other ERP …