Celebrating Diversity in Our New Office in Dublin
Annrai O'Toole, Workday's chief technology officer, EMEA, provides an insider's view as to what's happening inside Workday's new European headquarters office.
Annrai O’Toole
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Annrai O’Toole
Annrai O’Toole served as chief technology officer for EMEA at Workday until 2018, responsible for technology strategy and driving innovation.
Annrai previously served as Workday’s general manager for Europe. Before that he was CEO at Cape Clear, acquired by Workday in 2008. Cape Clear developed the industry’s leading enterprise service bus—a technology for integrating applications using Web services, which served as the foundation for the Workday Integration Cloud. Prior to Cape Clear, Annrai founded and served as executive vice president and chief technical officer at IONA Technologies. Annrai began his career working with European and international standards bodies to develop standards for software interoperability. With these and other initiatives, he has helped define the direction of the computer industry.
Annrai holds a master’s degree in computer science and a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering from Trinity College in Dublin.
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Ireland’s Software Industry: Fiche Bliain ag Fás
Today, Taoiseach Enda Kenny visited the Workday office in San Francisco as part of a tour of U.S. technology companies. The prime minister’s visit to the Bay Area makes it worth reflecting a little more on where we’ve come from in Ireland—and what possibilities exist.
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The Enterprise Cloud: A Unified Architecture Means Unified Experience
The way a vendor builds an enterprise system can have profound implications for the usability and flexibility of the products it delivers to customers.
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Workday and Cape Clear: Five Years On
Where does the time go? This time five years ago, Workday announced it had acquired Cape Clear, a provider of Web services integration technology I founded with David Clarke in 1999. I am still here, as is most of the original team.
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Integration in the Cloud
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.
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Tipping Points in Enterprise SaaS
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.
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On Payroll: Talking with Mark Newsome, Sr. Corporate HR Manager at McKee Foods
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.
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Cloud Maintenance
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.
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Living the Dream – Annrai O’Toole and Workday iPhone
Today we announced support for the iPhone. As Ray Wang told IDG , enterprise solutions that don’t address mobility are ’so last century.It’s a pretty cool app that allows a our users to complete things like hiring (or firing) approvals, fill in expense claims and do lots of other things, while they are on the road.
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Message and Messenger – Annrai O’Toole Workday HR Software Systems
“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!
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Predicting 2009
Cliche, perhaps, but please indulge me as we start the year. As I sat down to think about the year to come, what’s interesting is that in spite of all the talk of global uncertainty there are some things about 2009 that seem pretty crystal clear. Let me know if you agree.
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Inhaling Our Own Fumes
On re-reading the last post I wrote, I was wondering if it was a little over the top? Was I spending too much time inside Workday drinking a little too much of our own kool aid? believing too much in our own hype? (as you can see, this sentence could go for ever).
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The Total Cost of Ownership
The markets stink, the global economic mood is depressed, people aren’t spending money and every day the papers and Web news sites have new, bad news. Strange as it may seem, I’m excited. This is the ideal time for Software-as-a-Service.
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Taking a SWAG at “The Cloud”
On re-reading the last post I wrote, I was wondering if it was a little over the top? Was I spending too much time inside Workday drinking a little too much of our own kool aid? believing too much in our own hype? (as you can see, this sentence could go for ever).
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Concrete Cloud Computing
Benefits administration is a headache for HR people, balancing the needs of the employee for great coverage with the needs of the organization to maintain a reasonable cost profile. To make things simpler, organizations often integrate the benefits provider’s online capabilities with their HRMS, eliminating some of the pain associated with keeping employee records accurate.
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Cloud Computing
The term “Cloud Computing” is getting a lot of air play these days — it is the computing equivalent of a U.S. Presidential Election. It has loads of twists and turns, plenty of eager participants, lots of money being spent on it and it gets to consume large amounts of the news cycle…often without a lot of new information. So what exactly is “Cloud Computing”? I’m gonna have a crack at answering that question and (as an encore) talk a little about where Workday stands in the whole Cloud Computing debate
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Putting the Focus on People
Now, some of you out there may say that enterprise software solves complex problems and therefore it must be hard to use in order to accomplish its mission. But as Robert X. Cringely noted in a recent post, big enterprise software companies regularly made their software harder to use than it needs to be.
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Change Can be a Good Thing – Annrai O’Toole and Workday the opposite of ERP
A lot of the debate about “change” in ERP gets focused on the database. For a whole set of very obvious reasons, the relational database, has a crucial role in any business software system. Upon first encountering ERP, many of my smart friends would tell me that that the big source of system complexity is the thousands of database tables. Indeed, a colleague of mine from a very large bank told me they spent $50m a year to keep a global, single instance of a traditional ERP system running. This seems like a lot of money just to manage a few thousand tables!
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ERP: Outside In
So this is how it starts. Here you have a guy with absolutely no ERP or application experience, co-writing a blog about ERP applications. It′s great!
