Workday to Acquire Platfora

We’re excited to announce that today Workday signed a definitive agreement to acquire Platfora, a leading provider of operational analytics and data discovery tools that enable companies to visually interact with and analyze petabyte-scale data in seconds. With the Platfora team and its technology unified within Workday, we will continue enriching the analytics in Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management so our customers can be even more prepared to tackle business problems and seize opportunities today and into the future.

You’ll notice some consistency in the Platfora acquisition with what we’ve done in the past. First, the acquisition mirrors our strategy of acquiring companies that have technologies we can build as part of the fabric of Workday. We never bolt on solutions because we believe our customers need applications built on one technology foundation, resulting in just a single version of Workday.

It also underscores our emphasis on acquiring companies who bring a talented, passionate team of employees who understand the value of collecting and connecting multiple forms of data to solve business problems. In fact, Platfora has been applauded for creating compelling tools tailored for data analysts and business users, working at some of the world’s largest companies to uncover important insights from all sorts of transactional, operational, customer, and machine data.

And that’s what this is all about—helping our customers unlock even more insights across various forms of financial, people, and operational data while cutting the total cost of ownership for managing business intelligence or data warehouses outside of Workday. Our customers have made it clear that they want to bring more data into Workday. The combination of Platfora with Workday gives us the ability to provide a more complete picture than ever before, treating all forms of data equally and allowing endless exploration of insights.

We are excited about the road ahead, and look forward to sharing more details at our upcoming customer conference, Workday Rising 2016, taking place September 26-29 in Chicago. In the meantime, please see below for a short FAQ.

Who is Platfora?

Based in San Mateo, Calif., Platfora was founded in 2011 and has become a leading provider of operational analytics and data discovery tools that enable companies to visually interact and analyze petabyte scale data of all forms in seconds.

Why is Workday acquiring Platfora?

The acquisition will enable Workday to continually enhance our analytics capabilities—especially areas like managerial reporting and operational analytics where insights are gathered by collecting and connecting multiple data sources (Workday and non-Workday data) to make business decisions. Customers want to drill down to transaction-level data and analyze it across multiple dimensions for calculating profitability, ROI, and other operational metrics. For example:

• Retail companies want to analyze profitability using point-of-sale (POS) data for a specific item sold.
• Insurance carriers want to analyze profitability using policy and claims data at the agent level.
• Consumer goods companies want to analyze their supply chain system data at the vendor or brand level for financial planning purposes.

Will the Platfora team join Workday?

Yes. They will continue to be based in their existing office in San Mateo.

How much is Workday paying for Platfora?

We are not disclosing terms of the deal.

When will the transaction close?

Workday expects the transaction to close in our third fiscal quarter.