Workday Extend Is Now Generally Available

Workday Extend (formerly called Workday Cloud Platform) fosters an even more connected, adaptable, and extensible Workday. Learn how our customers are already using it to adapt to rapid changes brought on by the pandemic.

Since we first announced our intent to open up the Workday platform, we’ve worked hard to develop a solution that pushes agility and adaptability to the next level, helping our customers and partners extend beyond core Workday applications to meet essential and changing needs. 

Today, we have two major updates to share as we advance our platform journey.

First, the product offering originally known as Workday Cloud Platform—for customers and partners to build applications and extensions on top of the delivered capabilities in Workday to meet their unique business needs—has been renamed Workday Extend. We’ve evolved the Workday Cloud Platform moniker to reference the broader portfolio of tools and solutions that support extensibility across Workday. This includes Workday Extend as well as Workday Integration Cloud—the set of integration capabilities included with all our products for accessing external systems, exchanging data, and automating processes. 

Second, and most importantly, we’re excited to announce that Workday Extend is now generally available to customers. 

And this couldn’t come at a more critical time. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed many businesses overnight and forced a new level of responsiveness. Those organizations that already work in the cloud are seeing the benefits of a system that is far more flexible and powerful than is possible with on-premise systems. 

Let’s circle back to why we decided to bring two extensibility solutions—Workday Extend and Workday Integration Cloud—together under a single portfolio. Our extensibility story starts with Workday Integration Cloud. Since its introduction in 2011, Workday Integration Cloud continues to be our proven and widely adopted enterprise-class integration solution. Just in this last year, Workday Integration Cloud supported more than 115 million customer integration requests. 

Workday Integration Cloud is a key element of our platform solution, and including it in the Workday Cloud Platform portfolio does not change or impact how our customers access this vital technology. Workday Integration Cloud remains an included core capability for all Workday applications. 

Helping Our Customers Create Solutions With Confidence

In making Workday Extend more broadly available, we are fostering an even more connected, adaptable, and extensible Workday to help customers continue to create value in these uncertain times. For example, Workday Extend has helped two of our Fortune 500 customers adapt swiftly to new business and safety requirements with the following specialized and critical features: 

  • A major media customer worked with Workday services to build and deploy an app for its essential employees to log hazard pay during the pandemic. They were able to move with agility and complete this in less than two weeks. 

  • A Workday partner is beginning work on an app to support the return to workplaces as COVID-19 restrictions ease. Workday Extend allowed for rapid development and prototyping, matching the pace of the fast-changing circumstances posed by the global pandemic. The app will offer an organization's employees a convenient way—within Workday—to self-assess every day for possible symptoms, and help determine if it’s safe to work at the office. Data gathered by self-assessments will be anonymously used to determine if specific work areas or floors are at particular risk, and will fuel rapid and effective decision-making for both the business and employees. 

In addition, IBM and PwC are creating Workday Extend apps to help our customers navigate the effects of COVID-19.

Workday Extend customers can develop with the confidence that their apps deploy and run reliably and securely in the Workday Cloud. There’s no need to deal with the headaches of greenfield development on general purpose platforms. The product handles hosting, pipelining, and deployment. To date, more than 80 apps have been built and deployed by customers. Here are a few other examples of some of the business-critical and innovative apps that our customers have built in recent months:

  • A compensation review app that simplifies budget allocation during the comp cycle.

  • A training validation app that ensures line-worker certification and safety in compliance with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

  • A student counseling app that connects struggling students with mentors.

  • A billing app that interfaces with paid learning content.

Our time spent with early-adopter customers has deeply informed and matured our platform. This means Workday Extend comes out of the gate with powerful, road-tested capabilities, including: 

  • User interface pages that match the familiar Workday experience on mobile and desktop. 

  • The ability to connect with any publicly available REST API (Workday or elsewhere).

  • Mature development tools, such as our authoring plugin, command line tool, and app management console.

  • Comprehensive support for Workday Extend development teams with an engaging set of educational and support resources.

Innovation Is a Team Sport

Innovation is bigger than any one company. Our systems integrations partners, with their pairing of industry experience and Workday product expertise, are building frameworks that set up our customers for efficient deployment and high performance. At the same time, we’re expanding the power of Workday Extend with new tools and components such as extending the object data model and workflow.

And, because we are all better when the community of Workday partners and customers work together, we are planning to deliver new ways for customer and partner developers to collaborate, share libraries, and share apps. 

At Workday, we believe that our innovations help drive our customers’ innovations, and vice-versa. Workday Extend will help our customers extend Workday well beyond its core, especially when coupled with the pristine data, proven security, personalized experience, and the reliability and performance of Workday. We can't wait to see what new experiences and apps will be created to navigate our changing world with agility, insight, and, as some of our customer use cases above prove is possible, compassion and care for the well-being of all.

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