Workday, a business software company, released its first product in 2007 and recently came out with the 22nd version of its software. It has a 23rd in the works, but you should wonder why it bothers. After all, what version of Facebook are we on?
“Companies like Workday are developing like consumer Internet companies, not traditional enterprise software companies,” said Aneel Bhusri, the co-founder and chief executive of Workday. “Companies like Facebook and Google just keep evolving.”
That is a potentially critical distinction between traditional enterprise software companies, like Oracle and SAP, and newer outfits like Workday, Salesforce.com and others. Their fast development is a proxy for a whole range of approaches to products and customers, and will dictate the terms by which the two sides fight for sales.
Take development of new software. Workday 22 has 347 new features, some 68 of which came from customers. The design of the product was created by six customers, along with Workday itself. Many of the changes are modest, but they happen quickly.
Traditional releases might have even more features, but they’d be created by the company, working with outside input like focus groups. A new version or Oracle, say, would come out every couple of years, and installing it could involve months of negotiation, purchasing, installation and training. The result, its proponents say, is full of dramatic, reliable changes.
Very likely, teams of engineers working on some part of the traditional upgrade could number in the hundreds, working in a so-called “waterfall” style of software development. Waterfall was fast in its time, and involves building and testing software in batches of weeks.
Workday’s version took six months to develop, and was installed for 400 companies in six hours (Workday claims 600 customers in total, but the rest aren’t yet fully deployed.) It ran smaller teams on styles like “agile” and “scrum,” which involve faster turnarounds.
Certainly, Workday probably couldn’t manage teams of hundreds of engineers. It doesn’t have that many people. Nor does it have anything like the thousands of business customers or Oracle or SAP, or the range of products. It’s easy to build a single product for everybody, when there aren’t as many customers.
That probably is not what is driving the change, however. It’s notable that the traditional schedule of business software releases, like the schedule of new computer servers and desktop machines, tended to track the same “every two-years or so” schedule as Moore’s Law (a dependable rule that semiconductors increase in density and fall in price on a regular basis.)
New chips meant new machines, and that added computing power meant you could put in bigger and more complex software. Being on that schedule birthed a thousand marketing programs, business engagements and product releases involved in the overall process.
When enterprise software companies like Workday live on cloud computing systems, the potential computing power is much less of a constraint — you just throw more machines at the cloud. The software isn’t limited to what a single server can do, either, so the organization of work is more around development costs and customer need.
Box, an online storage and collaboration software company, has never numbered its releases. “We might call them by a code name internally, but it’s nothing that a customer has to see,” said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and chief executive of Box.
In coming months, he said, the product will probably to become even more modular, so customers can use aspects of it, the way they might use some things from Google and not others. Modularity is the new customization.
The new style of development is likely to make the products look more like consumer software in other ways. On Tuesday, Workday released a tool for job recruiting that enables managers to search for people within their own organization who might want the job. People inside the company who see the opening can also use social media like Twitter or LinkedIn to suggest it to their social networks.
In August, the product will include analytics features that allow companies to spot what people on the outside are good candidates for the job, and how high a chance there is that those people would take it. Companies will also be able to scan their own ranks and spot which people are likely risks of leaving, and whether offering a new job or more money might help retain them.
“Finding a person should be like finding a flight online,” said Leighanne Levensaler, vice president in charge of the product. “You want a human resource system that works like online shopping – it looks at what you bought before, or what people like you tend to buy.”
The new software, she said, was built based on looking at eBay and Kayak.