It has been a great 10 years at Gartner. I cannot say enough nice things about the company, the people, and the job. An analyst gets a unique view of the industry. I have had the good fortune to work with many great end user companies, vendors, and consultants over the years. I know that Gartner's HCM coverage is in good hands with Thomas Otter and Jeff Freyermuth. They know stuff. If you are a Gartner client, take advantage of their knowledge and expertise.
I will miss working with them and the rest of our team that covers Financials, HCM, and Procurement. Along with Thomas and Jeff, Nigel Rayner, John Van Decker, Debbie Wilson, and our newest member, Chris Iervolino, have been a fantastic group. There are many, many others that I will miss working with as well. They are far too numerous to mention and I am sure I would forget some that I should not so I am not going to try to list them all. I hope that I will continue to work with many of Gartner's analysts in my new role.
So, what will I be doing at Workday? My job title is Vice President, Services Strategy and Marketing. For some, this may seem a bit odd on the surface. After all, I have been covering HCM software at Gartner and so the expectation might be that I would be working in product strategy. Why services strategy? One of the things that I had noticed in covering fast-growing, SaaS HCM vendors is that many had stellar reputations and references when they had a few hundred customers, but the customer experience started to become less consistent as they grew to a few thousand customers.
The challenge I am taking on is to help Workday scale the customer experience so it is consistently outstanding while it rapidly grows. Workday's partners will obviously be key and I expect to work with Jeff Pulver and his Business Development team. I also plan to work closely with Leighanne Levensaler and her product strategy team because I believe one of the ways that you deliver a consistent, high quality customer (and partner) experience is thinking about service as you design product. I will be on Jim Bozzini's team and working closely with our folks in the trenches implementing solutions for our customers led by Mike Maszka and George Sui.
Though it was not an easy decision to leave Gartner, I am extremely excited about the future with Workday. Workday is a technology and product innovator and I hope to do my small part to bring the same kind of innovative thinking to services. Stay tuned. I hope to share more as we take this journey.
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