Next week I’m heading down to L.A. for the annual InformationWeek500 conference. Sony Pictures, H.B. Fuller, and Flextronics will return this year to participate on a Workday customer panel, and Valspar will make its debut on the panel. Last year’s panel was a success, with IW500 attendees packing the room to ask our customers about their decisions to go with SaaS for their core HR systems.

My friend and industry colleague Bill Kutik, a leading expert on human resources technologies, asked me some time ago why I had left the analyst world and joined Workday. Were the industry watchers correct, he asked, in assuming Workday hired me to help it build out the best talent-management suite in the world?

When most people think about business intelligence (BI) they think about dedicated BI tools such as IBM’s Cognos, SAP’s Business Objects, and Oracle’s Hyperion products. You don’t hear them talk about applications that offer great BI.

The Workday customer panel had barely started the discussion when the first hand shot up from the audience. Those attending the recent event were CIOs and HR managers wanting to learn more about Workday and its SaaS offerings. It’s not surprising the first question was about data privacy.

When the Workday sales team met at headquarters last week to kick off the second half of a fantastic year, one of the topics we discussed was how team members should differentiate Workday’s SaaS from competitors’ “SaaS options” for on-premise software.