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?

HR consulting firm Mercer recently released a study showing that employers plan to make changes to their talent programs as the economy emerges from the recession. Mercer also noted that employers made “dramatic changes” to talent programs during the recession. With all this change going on, are we getting better at managing talent?

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.

The tough economy has hit IT budgets hard, but there’s one area where many companies continue to invest, and it might surprise people. According to a new Towers Watson survey, 83% of respondents said they are maintaining or increasing spending on HR software in 2010.