Aneel Bhusri Explains What Facebook and Google Can Learn From Workday
Bhusri is co-CEO of Workday, a human resources software-as-a-service company he cofounded with billionaire Dave Duffield.
Workday is still flying high from its hot IPO in October with a $10 billion market cap and the stock trading in the low $60s, compared to its IPO price of $28.
Bhusri is also a partner at Greylock Ventures who has backed a whole bunch of enterprise cloud companies like Cloudera, ServiceNow, Okta, Zuora and others.
Here's what he shared:
On consumer cloud companies like Facebook and Google:
"One thing that consumer cloud companies can learn from us is privacy and security. The enterprise cloud is a very secure cloud at this point," Bhusri said.
Because HR data is sensitive info, Workday's customers will investigate how it protects their data before signing contracts.
"We have to go through a detailed inspection, almost a colonoscopy procedure," he laughed. Consumer companies should mimic how enterprise clouds protect data, he believes.
On employees bringing their devices to work:
"I think the bring-your-own-device is the best thing that ever happened to CIOs. Now employees are paying for their own devices," he said.
On the hype over "big data" tech:
"I sit on the board of Cloudera, a big vantage point of big data. The hype is you need massive amounts of data to take advantage of these technologies," he said, referred to big data technologies like Hadoop.
But it's not about how much data you have. "The most important piece is a variety of data," he said, meaning the app should pull info from lots of sources, such as internal databases, the web, LinkedIn, Facebook likes, and so on.
On the future of cloud apps:
"Industry-specific applications" will be the next apps to head to the cloud. By that he means apps that do a specific function for a specific type of business, like hospitals, factories, retail and so on.
On the competition between all the big enterprise players and Amazon:
"I don't think anyone is better than Amazon and all the new generation of enterprise companies are basically copying them," he said. (He didn't mention the players by name but IBM, HP and Microsoft are three enterprise companies that are trying to eat Amazon's lunch.)
On the ability of the big tech incumbents like to stay on top:
"If you look at every layer at the IT stack today, there is a fundamentally better way than there was 10 years ago," he said. But startups have to "convince" CIOs to give up the old way of doing things. If a startup can't convince the CIO, they need to "go find another champion" at the customer site.
UPDATED: He specifically named his two big competitors by name, SAP and Oracle, as being at risk, but if "every layer of the IT stack" is up for grabs, that would include the layers dominated by Cisco, i.e. networking, and by EMC, i.e. storage.
Word is that the new champion could be the chief marketing officer, who commands a growing IT budget these days, too.