The Doppler Quarterly Winter 2019 | Page 41

Kronos is a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions. Unlike companies such as Microsoft, Google and IBM, Kronos is not a household name in the software industry. Yet our solutions are deployed by 35,000 organizations and used by more than 40 million people in over 100 countries every single day. Kronos was founded in 1977 and offered the first computerized time clock. Fast forward several decades, and Kronos had grown into the global leader in workforce manage- ment solutions, delivering innovations around scheduling, time and labor management – and yes, time clocks, among other areas – to help organizations solve complex work- force challenges. However, a few years ago, our CEO Aron Ain began to express concerns. We had eclipsed a billion dollars in revenue, had happy and engaged customers and employees, and con- tinued to grow as we steadily transitioned our sizable on-premises user base to a sin- gle-tenant cloud environment. Yet Aron kept saying he was nervous. Despite all the positives, Aron was thinking about the future. He was thinking about the possibility of an entrepreneurial startup breaking into the workforce management mar- ket and disrupting the very foundation that Kronos was built upon. Kodak, Xerox, Block- buster Video: the examples are almost cliché at this point of longtime leaders in their respective fields who went extinct after failing to react to a perfect storm of business and technology trends. After some period of deliberation, Aron and our leadership came to a decision: it was time to put Kronos out of business ourselves, before another company could do it to us. While this challenge afforded the opportunity to secure the future of Kronos for another 40 years, it was also reshaping the future of workforce management. The Billion-dollar Startup: Project Falcon While some facets of the project were clear from the start – we were focused on building a modern workforce management solution and would not veer off in a dramatic new direction – other aspects were much fuzzier. How would we do it? What types of technology would we incorporate? Would we be able to deliver a richer product experience than before? To answer these questions, Kronos launched an internal startup known as Project Falcon. It was initially staffed with a small but diverse team. Some were experienced Kronites, while others were straight out of college. Some had deep enterprise software creden tials WINTER 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 39