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 But he feels that the tools have been outdated, too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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