Workday Investor Scott Sandell On What’s Next In The Cloud
October 19, 2012
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tomio Geron.
Workday is the latest cloud technology company to go public this year and has drawn strong investor interest. It’s five times more expensive than Salesforce.com on a revenue basis, my colleague Eric Savitz notes. With Workday, the larger trend of software moving to the cloud has come in to focus. We caught up with early Workday investor Scott Sandell, a partner at New Enterprise Associates, to talk about Workday and trends in cloud computing.
What did Workday do that was so different?
Dave (Duffield) and Aneel (Bhusri) (cofounders of Workday) said: server technology has changed a lot. The main memory of servers has grown so large. It could be lightning fast. If we do a couple things right and have really good integration with the server for other applications in the enterprise–and then have a presentation layer that’s sophisticated so developers don’t have to care what kind of device it’s used on: tablet, laptop, etc.–then we could really do something. Their audacious goal was to build the entire ERM (human resources, finance) suite–core systems of record which companies use. These are systems of record because they contain all the important data…
You’ve known Aneel Bhusri for a long time?
I’ve known Aneel since we were in business school at Stanford. His first job was working for Dave at PeopleSoft. Then he went to Greylock. As VCs, we started making investments together. The first was Data Domain, (which was acquired for $2.1 billion by EMC). That led to about five others…
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