Workday Rising, held in Orlando, Florida, September 12-15, 2022, hosted nearly 9,000 in-person attendees, and thousands more joined through the Workday Rising Digital Experience. The event showcased Workday’s leadership in human capital management and enterprise insight solutions with new product enhancements, developer tools and capabilities, and a range of partner tools and offerings.  Highlights included:

• New offering announcements to provide better insights and support new post-pandemic working models for Human Resources and Financial departments
• Industry accelerators for banking, healthcare, insurance, and technology industries, developed with Workday partners
• Tools to assist customers and partners in building innovative solutions such as skills matching and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting
• Low-code/no-code capabilities for Workday Extend to simplify application development and speed time to market for solutions built on the Workday platform

Workday offers several tools for customers and partners to innovate on the platform. Workday Adaptive Planning is enterprise planning software that Deloitte used to build an ESG solution. Accenture built a solution on Workday Prism Analytics for skills matching. Workday Extend is an application development environment that can be leveraged to create solutions for emerging needs. This blog post will cover announcements related to the Workday Extend product and its implications for customers, competitors, and investors, followed by highlights of a couple of partner solutions at the conference.

Workday Extend
Workday outreach to allow developers to innovate on the top of core applications was launched by a Workday Cloud Platform blog post by CEO Aneel Bhusri in 2017. The goal of the offering was to allow upgrades to the applications that would not affect any add-on applications using Workday Extend. The Workday Extend product is built on a standard foundation consisting of a unified data core, a cohesive security model, a consistent user experience, and the same features across mobile and desktop apps.

The new Workday Extend capabilities announced at the event included a web-based Integrated Developer Environment (IDE), a low-code/no-code visual capability, and Workday Graph API for streamlining the API experience. All these capabilities simplify application development on the Workday platform by removing the complexity and need for professional developers. The ability to develop and deploy applications fast prompts organizations to choose a low-code/no-code over traditional application development tools.

Several Workday Extend customers were featured at the conference, including Accuride, Netflix, and SunLife. Eric Chung, Director, HR Systems Strategy & Architecture at SunLife, shared how the company used Workday Extend as a core component of innovation to deliver solutions to digitize paper processes and build digital-first scalable solutions.

Implications to customers
The breadth of Workday core offerings and the ability to accelerate application development with Workday Extend give customers new ways to innovate and meet the line of business demands. Removing the necessity of infrastructure management allows power users to build applications quickly without security risks, thus reducing the backlog of applications in a development manager’s pipeline.

Implications to competitors
Overall, Workday acquisitions address unmet customer needs and increase Workday usage footprint in enterprises. Competitors will likely find Workday capturing a higher market share and need to respond.
Low-code/no-code platforms are very sticky and often make the platform challenging to displace for customers, and competitors need to take heed.

Implications to investors
Partner solutions, like Accelerate2Zero by Deloitte, open opportunities for Workday to penetrate non-Workday customers. These partner solutions and Workday Extend can open new opportunities for Workday by increasing the addressable market size. In response to an analyst question, Workday intends to grow beyond North America using hyper scale vendor infrastructure. Investors should consider these initiatives when projecting Workday revenue growth.

Summary:
Workday Rising showcased product enhancements across the portfolio.  Top event sponsors included marquee systems integrators demonstrating the benefits of their Workday partnership.  Customers attending the event see Workday Extend as a differentiator versus competitors and the new App Builder and Workday Graph API as great additions.  Workday has launched an annual Developer Conference to help attract innovation on the platform and grow its base of 3200 developers and 750 applications. With an appropriate focus on developers, Workday has an opportunity to increase the adoption of Workday Extend exponentially.

Partner briefings

Skyhive: Sean Hinton (Founder & CEO) from Skyhive explained the product with an analogy similar to what Crispr is in biology. Skyhive provides a quantum labor analysis of the labor market. Skyhive uses a natural language processing engine to monitor labor market supply and demand, processing about 22 terabytes of data daily. The engine automates extraction from soft skills, job titles, salary levels, etc., to create a knowledge graph of relationships between data. The company has information on 64 million companies and about a billion people and build on Databricks running on AWS.

Skyhive is more beneficial for large employers requiring in-depth information to fill skill gaps. With Accenture and Workday as investors, the organization is positioned well from both a product and end-user perspective.

Auditoria: The company primarily targets the accounting department, specifically the CFO and Controllers. While the name may suggest helping in the audit process, the company automates several business processes in the financial organization. These include accounts payable, accounts receivables, general ledger, and vendor management. Assisting in the audit process is one of the several processes Auditoria includes as benefits of the offering.

With the CFO and Controllers being primary beneficiaries of the product, it is not surprising that Workday, as an investor and partner, brings in 1/3rd of the Go-To-Market (GTM) for the company.