The Workday Cloud Platform Progress Report

It’s been a year since we officially announced the Workday Cloud Platform, and we’re happy to report that customers and partners are taking full advantage of our latest milestones on the journey towards even greater extensibility.

As part of that journey, we are excited to announce App Creator—bringing the power of the Workday Cloud Platform to non-developers. In addition, we are launching a marketplace, designed to make it easy to find and access solutions built by the Workday ecosystem including customers, partners, and independent developers.

We sat down with David Clarke, senior vice president of technology infrastructure at Workday, to discuss these latest updates, and to learn more about what’s to come with the Workday Cloud Platform in 2019 and beyond.

The Workday Cloud Platform provides professional developers—and now the aforementioned citizen developers—with the ability to extend the power of Workday’s frameworks, and business object model, in ways that drive additional value for their particular business. In other words, although we have always had a myriad of ways to extend Workday, there are some situations where a customer’s needs are so particular that they are better suited applying their own expertise rather than teaching us what they already know. This way, we focus on what we’re best at, and our customers can do the same.

The Workday Cloud Platform is currently available to our early adopter customers, many of whom already have important applications live and in production. We will be progressively expanding both the type of use cases that we support, and the number of customers we are working with, as we head toward the full general availability of the Workday Cloud Platform in 2019.

Before we dive into use cases, it may be helpful to share some specifics on the Workday Cloud Platform’s technical capabilities. Leveraging the Power of One, The Workday Cloud Platform allows you to:

• Extend the data model by adding fields and attributes that are meaningful to you
• Extend the processing model by defining new business processes that work on this data
• Create new layouts and forms by combining your data and processing into rich experiences that make the most sense to you
• And in the future, Workday Cloud Platform users will be able to build and share full-fledged applications

Our early customers are utilizing the Workday Cloud Platform today in a host of incredibly powerful ways. From digital badges that enable employees to communicate their skills and achievements to peers, to augmenting corporate security practices in order to better manage employee vehicles and help with site security, to simplifying the recruiting process at job fairs, our ecosystem of customers and partners is only just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible.

In addition to these valuable use cases, let’s talk more about App Creator and Workday Marketplace. App Creator is the result of hearing from our customers that they needed to provide extensibility for two main categories of developers. The first category called for sophisticated application development, where skilled developers write code directly against Workday REST APIs.

The second category allows non-developers (system administrators, for example) to define and build meaningful application extensions, without writing code. And for this important community, App Creator is a low-code tool that allows them to create rich experiences using a simple drag and drop environment, available to Workday Cloud Platform users in the spring of 2019.

Workday Marketplace is the fastest path to extensibility. Before building a solution, you can see if someone else has already created it. This enables you to easily find solutions created by Workday and our software and content partners to extend and expand your Workday experience. And, in the future, this will be the home for the Workday Cloud Platform applications.

We’re excited about how much progress we and our community have made in one short year. Our move to open the Workday Cloud Platform and allow Workday to be extended is the next phase in helping customers get the most from their enterprise applications. We hope you come along for the ride.