Openness is the new black for forward-looking companies. While we have been using and contributing to open source and open standards since our founding, the Workday Cloud Platform has unlocked a new, unprecedented level of openness for our company and our customers.
The enterprise software ecosystem today is a very different place than it was when just a few large players—who could afford massive infrastructure, expertise, and budgets—dominated the industry. Today, we’re in the era of the enterprise cloud ecosystem—thanks to the rise of public cloud infrastructure, rapid innovation in open source software, and maturing open standards—making the barriers to entry for enterprise developers lower than ever.
Now, an enterprise developer anywhere in the world has instant access to the same global infrastructure as the world’s largest corporations. Anybody can identify a business need, build a solution using the latest technologies, bring it to market, and iterate on it—all within a short timeframe. This change has resulted in an explosion of enterprise cloud applications of every shape and size in the last few years.
It is exciting to see companies today taking full advantage of this new world order. The average large enterprise today uses a constellation of around 1,000 cloud applications—and recent IDC research predicts that this application portfolio will grow by 50% over the next two years.
While this explosion of applications in the enterprise is empowering and valuable, our customers have explained that this deluge creates a number of challenges. First, they must ensure that security, data access, and compliance are maintained across all of their applications—keeping in mind regulatory requirements such as the new GDPR regulations set to soon take effect. And second, customers are constantly seeking to reduce complexity and simplify the overall experience for their employees.