How Workday Integration Cloud Accelerates Digital Transformation for Our Customers

We know that success in the cloud is dependent on integrations, and since the launch of Workday Integration Cloud in 2011, we’ve seen it drive faster time to value, greater agility, and more openness for our customers. Workday Integration Cloud is key to our customers’ fast and successful transition to the cloud—and for their continued success as business needs, tools, and technologies continue to evolve. 

From day one, these fundamental integration capabilities have been available for free to all customers for accessing external systems, exchanging data, and automating processes. With nearly every customer using Workday Integration Cloud, we have now served more than one billion customer integration requests.

As proof of changing business needs requiring the utmost in agility, we’re proud to note that more than 100 Workday customers were recently able to use Workday Integration Cloud to swiftly react to the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of these organizations were able to provide their employees with one-time payments to help offset the financial burden faced by so many as a result of the pandemic. This was no small feat; processing tens of thousands of payments in under 24 hours without writing a single line of code. Normally, this would take at least 50 hours of a programmer’s time to write the custom integration—to say nothing of executing it and getting payments to employees. That’s the kind of capability and time savings we provide to every customer with Workday Integration Cloud.

More and more organizations are replacing antiquated, on-premise applications with SaaS-based cloud applications. Leveraging best-of-breed cloud applications and platforms is a key component of any digital transformation—where tools and technologies drive business strategy and marketplace success. But, senior IT leaders are wary of creating decentralized silos of data and business processes. They need to know that they are creating efficiencies, not barriers. Combining, maintaining, and evolving a seamlessly integrated portfolio of applications, data, and business processes augmented with analytics and machine learning is what companies need to achieve the agility required across all their business operations to compete in today’s rapidly changing business environment. 

Through a library of APIs, pre-built connectors, and easy to use tools, IT can quickly build custom integrations for their unique needs. Implementing a standards-based integration approach allows IT teams to implement their digital initiatives as quickly and efficiently as possible. Ultimately, this means that IT teams are able to remain firmly focused on executing digital strategies, not maintaining custom code.

Reducing the Friction

At Workday, we have always believed that mission-critical business systems should be in the cloud—and integration is key to that cloud-based architecture. Workday Integration Cloud was built from enterprise-class integration technologies and forged into the core of Workday; available to all users and applications on the platform. Unlike general purpose integration tools or iPaaS, Workday Integration Cloud provides a highly focused toolset to help our customers get the most value out of both Workday and their other complementary mission-critical business applications.

Workday Integration Cloud is built specifically to help customers quickly and cost effectively get up and running on Workday. Leveraging existing Workday skillsets, our customers can utilize powerful Workday capabilities such as configurable security, business processes, reporting, and auditing to build and maintain integrations for their unique needs. In addition, Workday Integration Cloud provides out-of-the-box benefits and payroll integrations, integration tooling, and thousands of APIs and pre-built connectors to do all the heavy lifting for our customers. We work to make it as easy as possible to build and maintain integrations. Ultimately, Workday Integration Cloud is designed to make the transition to cloud and digital architectures as easy as possible for IT teams. 

And, not content to rest on our laurels, we have continually evolved Workday Integration Cloud since its debut almost 10 years ago. Workday Integration Cloud is now part of the new Workday Cloud Platform (WCP) portfolio. WCP now encompasses tools and solutions that support openness and extensibility across Workday. Through major technology investments in scalability and resiliency, we have enabled our customers—including some of the largest retailers and financial institutions in the world—to transition complex, resource-intensive, on-premise processes like payroll to the cloud. 

In fact, Workday Integration Cloud now has more than 325 REST APIs and 600 packaged application integrations, including end-to-end integration with more than 225 benefits providers. Additionally, our systems integrations ecosystem of more than 250 partners has to date deployed 210,000 integrations using Workday Integration Cloud.

As we look back on the journey of Workday Integration Cloud, we couldn’t be more proud of the critical role it has played to help so many of our customers successfully transition and operate their mission-critical applications in the cloud. It’s with that same pride and excitement that we look to the future, and can’t help but think the best is yet to come.