Duffield's emerging Workday

While many of the details remain sketchy, some bits of information regarding the new company being created by PeopleSoft founder David Duffield have begun to trickle out of the venture.

First off, the company appears to have found a name, Workday, which leads one to think that Duffield and his team are building a set of tools aimed at improving the way people interface with daily business information, as in, redefining the corporate workday. The company has already linked its existing site at Duffield's eponymous davesnextmove.com to www.workday.com, and somewhat refined the site's explanation of what sort of software or services it will produce.

The new declaration reads that Mr. Duffield and team "will provide a revolutionary application platform and the next generation of business applications to drive your enterprise's performance." Workday claims its "applications will be dramatically easy to use, be responsive to your organization's changing needs and will significantly lower your total cost of ownership."

It seems as if we've heard this somewhere before; namely from every enterprise software on the market, including PeopleSoft.

However, the Workday site does indicate how the firm is hoping to differ from its ERP forbearers. According to the company, it will design tools that allow organizations to address business changes by "surrounding their rigid ERP system with newer point solutions." The Workday offering will also promise to "facilitate customization as well as seamless integration with third-party solutions."

That wording is clearly reminiscent of what has been heard of late out of Salesforce.com, particularly in regards to its Multiforce development platform, which pledges many of the same benefits.

The Workday site also rebukes the complex installation models offered by traditional ERP systems, which could indicate that Workday will go to market under the software as a service umbrella popularized by CRM upstart Salesforce.

In other news, AMR Research Analyst Bruce Richardson reports that Duffield's charitable investment fund for former PeopleSoft staffers, also known as The Safety Net, has dispensed some $2 million in grants among the over 300 individuals that have applied for help from the effort. With an approximate $8 million left in potential handouts, according to Richardson, the group said it plans to keep giving money away until it has been completely depleted.