As Ray Wang tweeted today, Workday are dusting off the Cape Clear Eclipse technology and planning on making it more widely available to our customers. Why are we doing this? Well, there is one very simple reason: We want to make it easier for our customers to consume the powerful Web Services that we expose.

A core tenet of SaaS has always been that it is a lot cheaper than on-premise software. This is based on the fact that there are no upfront license fees, and no hardware, maintenance or upgrade costs. As with all technology shifts, this promise has been met with healthy skepticism and not a little FUD from the incumbent on-premise vendors.

McKee Foods Corporation, Workday customer #7, worked closely with us in the development of our Payroll product and on 2nd April 2009 they went into production on both Workday HCM and Payroll. McKee replaced an on-premise ERP system and is now using Workday to process more than 350,000 paychecks/year for 6,500 empoyees in 7 plants across the U.S.

McKinsey tells us that the “Cloud” is over hyped and users can get better TCO through “aggressive virtualization”. Google responded , saying that there is more to the Cloud than just virtualization. They point out that very large scale hardware infrastructure is hard to do, the “Cloud” is more about software than hardware, and finally, that the Cloud delivers a constant stream of innovation—something that is very hard to do by just virtualizing your applications.

“No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.” No, it’s not a quote from an embattled CEO of a automaker/large bank. It was in fact written by Sophocles in the 5th century BC. Confusing the messenger and the message has a long history!