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.

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.

I've been looking for opportunities to innovate for more than 40 years, having always been captivated by each new generation of technology and the gains it can bring to business—from the mainframe through client-server and now to SaaS and the Cloud. I've founded five companies in my career, and it's no secret that Workday is likely my last—and it also feels like the best. For one simple reason: We're clearly saving our customers time and money.

There’s a bit of age discrimination going on with enterprise software, and it’s based on the assumption that older, tradition-bound companies view SaaS with a gimlet eye. Older companies, with all their legacy and cultural issue—the assumption goes—have left the SaaS party up to the young companies selling this newfangled stuff to other young companies with little or no established IT infrastructure.