Welcome to the Workday Integration Cloud

Today we’re formally launching the Workday Integration Cloud Platform, marking an important day for Workday, our customers, and our partners. Everyone in the Workday ecosystem can now use a proven set of tools we’ve developed to build integrations that connect Workday with other business systems and applications.

The Workday Integration Cloud Platform delivers significant business value to our customers and partners in three key areas, affectionately referred to as the 3 C’s:

• Cost. Using Workday Studio and the Enterprise Interface Builder, customers and partners can dramatically reduce the time and expense of building and maintaining integrations. Specifically, they can now take advantage of easy-to-use, open, Web services-based integration tools while leveraging the economies of scale offered by the Workday Integration Cloud.
• Choice. Opening up our integration platform also increases choice for our customers by making it easy for a multitude of application software vendors and system integrators to build applications and quickly integrate them to Workday applications. Ultimately, we expect the number of partners using our integration platform will grow exponentially, much like we have seen the explosion of partners around the Salesforce.com ecosystem.
• Community. The power of community enjoyed by Workday customers and partners—made possible by the ability to share and collaborate around single versions of multi-tenant SaaS applications—naturally extends to our integration platform. It’s far easier to re-use and share integrations built for a single software version with other organizations compared with the on-premise software world, where integrations vary widely due to the multitude of software versions and the complexity of customizations. Over time, we expect high levels of collaboration and sharing within the community around our integration technology.

From Cape Clear to iPaaS

From a technology perspective, the Workday Integration Cloud Platform marks our initial foray into the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) marketplace. At this time, we are only offering the integration piece of PaaS and are specifically not launching an application software development platform. Gartner and others recognize our offering as an integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), focused on providing the building blocks for easier integrations. We are proud to be the first enterprise-class SaaS provider to offer these capabilities for the Human Capital Management (HR, Talent, and Payroll) and Financials markets.

Taking a walk down memory lane, the Workday Integration Cloud was made possible by the acquisition of Cape Clear, an early and well-regarded provider of Web-services-based middleware integration technology based in Dublin, Ireland. The company was led by Annrai O’Toole and David Clarke, two well-respected pioneers in the world of integration, middleware, and Web services (and three years later, both are in senior leadership roles at Workday). With the merger, Workday has been able to realize the vision of delivering market-leading SaaS applications with a best-of-breed integration platform, something the legacy vendors never delivered. And never will.

We are confident that the Workday Integration Cloud ecosystem will become more valuable to our customers and partners over time, which is why we’ll continue to invest in and expand that ecosystem in the coming months and years. Expect to hear more from Derek Butts, our newly appointed GM of the Workday Integration Cloud (and one of our rising stars), as we announce new programs for current and future partners.

Welcome, customers and partners, to the Workday Integration Cloud.

p.s. Expect a blog from our CTO Stan Swete that will go into more detail about the individual components of the Workday Integration Cloud. Very cool stuff.