Dave Duffield sheds light on his Workday

PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield and friends have been working in their post-Oracle era on a new set of enterprise applications built from the ground up on modern technology--XML, SOA, Web services--to enable an "innovative core design." The Workday Web site has a preview, but it's more of a statement of position--no screenshots, test drives or other useful data. 

The preview starts out with an indictment of the applications PeopleSoft and others built over the last few decades.

Enterprise applications were not built for today's dynamic business environment. They rely on a static and aging data model that was developed more than ten years ago. They are rigid, inflexible, and built with yesterday's technology. Customers are forced to make large upfront investments for software, hardware, middleware, database and professional services, and then suffer through elongated implementations and complex, costly upgrades.

What can be gleaned from the Web site is that Workday is delivering on-demand, hosted enterprise applications via subscription license, with native components that deal with governance, compliance, legislative and reporting tasks. The first application, Workday Human Capital Management, is now available, according to the site, but all you will find is descriptive ad copy. Seems like a strange way to launch a product. More to come on Workday...