Workday Product Prez Gerrit Kazmaier: Agent-Powered ERP for AI Era

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore Workday’s bold entry into the ERP space and share insights from my interview with Gerrit Kazmaier on how AI and data are reshaping enterprise software.

Highlights

00:24 — Last week, 30,000 people were at Workday’s big Rising event in San Francisco. I had a chance to sit down with Product and Technology President Gerrit Kazmaier to talk about his views on how the Workday approach to ERP is going to be different from what we see from other players.

01:08 — Kazmaier brings enterprise applications, data, data cloud, hyperscale — all those different backgrounds, expertise, and experiences — to Workday. And now he's taken a very aggressive agenda in these first six or seven months, leading up to this notion of ERP. Workday moved into the ERP space with a lot of new introductions, agents, and more at last week's Rising event.

01:48 —And a couple of things that Kazmaier talks about: Kazmaier believes the ERP concept is right — giving business leaders a chance to see what's going on inside their companies from multiple perspectives with fully integrated applications. But he feels that the tools have been outdated, too difficult, too slow, too fragmented.

02:08 —So Workday, although for its first 20 years had avoided getting into ERP, now feels that the time is right to give huge value to customers. Also, for the Data Cloud, it's now got partnerships to enhance the way it's able to give customers better use and value from the data they have. These include partnerships with Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

02:54 —So that full interview with Gerrit Kazmaier, President of Products and Technology at Workday, is coming up here. It's got not just him in a new role, but also Rob Enslin, over the last several months, as Chief Commercial President and Chief Commercial Officer, and a new Chief Technology Officer, Peter Bayless, who came to Workday from Google Cloud.

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