We were invited to the yearly Workday Technology Summit in the beautiful Golden Gate Club in the San Francisco Presidio. More than 20 analysts and influencers spent a full day with Workday executives getting briefed on the latest and greatest of where Workday is today and where it plans to go. 

Again another event where it was hard to pick the top 3 takeaways - but here is my attempt to it:
 
  • More Standards for Cloud Infrastructure - One of the key concerns we hear from end users, usually the technical side of any due diligence on Workday selections, are questions about the viability and scalability of the Workday technology stack. Everybody understands that at the time Workday started off, there were no ‘off the shelf’ options to build a modern cloud infrastructure, nor were there any public or private cloud vendors and technologies of record. But the concern today is how Workday can support and scale (more from a human than technical perspective) their in house developed technology. So it was great news already at Tech Summit in 2013 to see OpenStack being discussed, and 12 months later we learnt much more on the progress on the topic from David Clarke: Workday is actively working with OpenStack (RedHat distribution) and plans to have 5 customers live in production on OpenStack by early 2015. In the meantime Workday is running development and test systems both on Amazon’s AWS and HP Cloud (Helion?). The ability to run development and test systems on standard IaaS vendor’s clouds like AWS and HP and the support of ‘approved’ cloud technologies like OpenStack will be a key confidence building point working for Workday with both CTOs and CIOs. Push comes to shove, Workday could technically - not that the vendor gave any indication this is a desired deployment scenario soon - deploy on a private cloud. But a good capability to have in your back pocket, given competitors like Oracle and Infor offering this option.

    On top of that Workday is doing all the important and good housekeeping duties for its cloud infrastructure, while customers are live and not disrupted. For instance Workday was able to change the complete storage sub system in the course of the last 12 months. Being able to do this ‘in flight’ is a major achievement for Workday.

    Lastly it is good to see that the team around Clarke is undertaking disaster preparedness sessions around disaster recovery on the management side and implementing AWS like availability zone model across their currently 4 data centers.
 
Screenshot from Clarke's presentation

  • Payroll - Workday reconfirmed the 2015 (UK) and 2016 (France) delivery dates for its additions of payrolls to their existing US and Canadian ones. Beyond that scope the vendor is convinced it will be able to partner with local payroll vendors going forward. Workday has the capability for bi-directional payroll integration and thinks that this provides its customers enough visibility in payroll matters. And finally Workday is undertaking scalability testing of its payroll, with good results. It will be interesting to see, if Workday will be able to stay course of 4 payrolls and then partner payroll strategy in the years to come. 
 
Korngiebel's SmartWatch Demo for T&E

  • User Interface - We got an in depth demo about the progress Workday has made on the UI side in the last 12 months. And indeed the team has done a lot of work, starting with a brand new Android native client, more adaptive design brought to more products and clients, new functionality like e.g. Job Change brought to the iPhone client, new PIN login, the W-Drive and more, all very good progress and housekeeping on the new UI Workday that just rolled out earlier this year.

    On the innovation side Joe Korngiebel was the first UI design lead to show a smartwatch demo in an expense approval scenario. In general the Workday UIs look clean and easy to use, but in these fast paced times for UI innovation we think Workday will probably need a next generation facelift in the next 12 months to keep up with the latest we are seeing from Workday competitors. Moving to a flat design as Korngiebel announced will be a good first step. More is likely to come later this year. 

TidBits

  • Finance & HR, better together – The day started with Betsy Bland and Leighanne Levensaler giving an update on where respectively Finance and HR stand. They both provided a number of integration benefits that customers and prospects should pay attention at. I am not sure if these synergies are strong enough yet to almost default the attach rate of Finance to HR installs, but it is good to see Workday working on suite level benefits. 
  • Learning - I asked Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri on the strategy in regards of Learning, the last functional piece missing for Workday to complete the Talent Management suite of products - and he confirmed that the approach - for now - is to partner.
 

MyPOV

Workday is solidly executing on its roadmap and delivering what it has promised to customers. Two key performance factors that are key for SaaS vendors who have to earn the trust from their customers’ day in and day out. It is also evident that the Workday technical teams can implement necessary housekeeping items and innovations while customers are operational, a key capability for any SaaS vendor.

From the executive Q&A at the end of the day it was clear, that Workday’s Bhusri is focusing the vendor on promises made and getting the Finance product to the maturation Workday wants (and needs) it to get to. It seemed like that when that point is reached, Workday will revisit its agenda in regards of further functional roadmap items, vertical extensions, even potentially dabbling into PaaS (Bhusri said it would be with a lower case ‘P’).

A lot of hoopla was made around the impression the analyst community had, that Workday now wants to be more than the system of record, but a system of engagement. Not sure where Workday will take this topic down the road - but certainly making HCM applications more engaging for its users is desirable. However, engaging enterprise software doesn’t make that software the system of engagement - so we will have to check back in on that topic, hopefully soon.

For existing customers it is good to see, that Workday is making progress and is far from resting on its laurels as the category leader for cloud HCM. More cloud deployments options - though not available for customers right now - are a key confidence and investment security aspect for Workday.

For prospects, Workday is and remains a key vendor to evaluate and likely to shortlist.

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More on Workday
 
  • Workday 22 - Recruiting and rich Workday 22 are here - read here
  • First Take - Why Workday acquired Identified - (real) Analytics matter - read here
  • Workday Update 21 - All about the user experience and some more - read here
  • Workday Update 20 - Mostly a technology release - read here
  • Takeaways from the Salesforce.com and Workday parnership - read here
  • Workday powers on - adds more to its plate - read here
  • What I would like Workday to address this Rising - read here
  • Workday Update 19 - you need to slow down to hurry up - read here
  • I am worried about... Workday - read here
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.
2012, 2013 & 2014 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

 

Business Research Themes

Future of Work, Tech Optimization

Roles

Chief Information Officer, Chief People Officer

Tags

ceridian, financials, hcm, infor, oracle, sap, successfactors, ultimate, workday