Workday Podcast: DevTalk: Enabling Business Agility Through Cloud Technology

Josh Krist: Welcome to the Workday Podcast. I've had the pleasure of working with our next guest, Matt Grippo, VP of Cloud Platform here at Workday, on a number of articles for the Workday Blog. His ability to translate deep technical knowledge into clear language is just unparalleled. That's why I'm excited to have him on the show today to talk about building business agility through technology. I'm your host, Josh Krist. Welcome, Matt.

Grippo: Hey, how are you?

Krist: Good. How are you doing today?

Grippo: Oh, I'm doing good.

Krist: And can we start off just telling me a little bit about your background and then your current role here at Workday?

Grippo: Sure. I started my career as an engineer. And probably the first 10 years of my career, in my 20s and in my 30s, that was my main gig.  and so I, I carry that around with me through the rest of my career, and I've always-- I think, in some ways, always been an engineer at heart. I like building stuff.

Krist: Right.

Grippo:  and I like fixing stuff too, so those two things are really, um-- really drive me a lot.  and I love the concrete nature of being able to build things. I miss that about, you know, being an engineer for a living.  so I started-- you know, that's how I started my career. Went on, did a bunch of different things, you know, went-- I went back to school again, got a business degree, moved over to the East Coast and ended up running or,  sort of co-running a,  digital consultancy over there for a few years. And I think that's where I really got my chops in project work. I mean, we were an augmentation shop for digital agencies. So, you know, we were sort of the tech ninjas, and I had an engineering team underneath me, and what, what we would do is a lot of times these agencies would get into trouble. They'd pitch something with their client. They'd say, "We can do this," you know. And then the project would go sideways for them.

Krist: Oh, their reach would exceed their grasp a little bit?

Grippo: Yeah. And then they'd call us and say, "Can you guys make this happen? And oh, by the way, we've been working on it for six months. It's a month away from it being due, and you've got to figure out how to make it work."

Krist: So you're kind of the Mr. Wolf of, of that Pulp Fiction universe, the fixer.

Grippo: Yeah.

Krist: Okay.

Grippo: And so I think with that, I, bring that sort of understanding of how to operate in a resource-constrained en-environment. I think, for a lot of our customers and partners, you know, projects are hard. You don't always have all the people you need. A lot of times, deadlines are really tight. You have to figure out how to make things work under, you know, really difficult and challenging circumstances. And I think that's an important thing to remember, and especially in the business we're in.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: You know, ended up having my first kid.  not personally, but it was my wife had our first child. [laughter] And we ended up deciding to move back to the Bay Area because that's where most of our family was. In the process of doing that, that's when I took the job at Workday. That was back in 2011. I've been at Workday for 10 years.

Krist: Congrats.

Grippo: Yeah. And so, I've had many lives at Workday. I started on the mobile team, went on to work and manage the design team for a while, returned to mobile for a period of time, then was managing the machine learning team for a few years. And then my most recent kind of part of my nine lives at Workday has been managing the Workday Cloud Platform team.

Krist: What is your mission as VP of Cloud Platform? I mean, what do you get up for in the morning, and what excites you?

Grippo: Well, it kind of goes back to that I like building stuff.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: I think the way I'd put it is I like creating value. I think that's maybe a more broad way to put it. I like the innovation. I like seeing, in the cloud platform realm at Workday, we've done a lot of firsts, and so watching those firsts happen. And this is an example of that, right? I mean, this isn't a product situation, but this is the first year that DevCon has happened in person, right? You know, we did a sort of a mini version of this conference last year, remote, but, you know, we're sitting here seeing the first conference for developers. And, I mean, being a part of that first, not being fully responsible for it, but being a part of it and seeing it form and seeing my team flourish underneath it and see how receptive the customers have been and the partners have been, I just-- I love that. That first day yesterday was really special, walking in and seeing it.

Krist: Yeah. And for people who don't know, what is the Workday Cloud Platform? How you describe it quickly?

Grippo: Right. Well, here's a lot of confusion there too because originally we had this product that we now call Extend. And we were calling that Workday Cloud Platform a few years ago. And what we realized was we needed to form a product around the Workday Cloud Platform technology and really explain what that product was for.

Krist: Mm-hmm.

Grippo: And we said, "We need to call a lot of these technologies and what we're offering to our customers as a product Extend." Because what it is really incredible at is allowing our customers to extend the base functionality of Workday. So we had a bit of a branding change there. We said, "Hey, this thing is called Extend. This is what we're selling to you and offering to you." And this idea of cloud platform is a wider concept. And underneath cloud platform, I think of it as containing three main elements. And I think of it as the verbs of Workday. So if you think of the base of Workday as the nouns, the applications, our base security, our capabilities around analytics, our business process, the data, you know, the underlying architecture and technology, that's all our nouns. And then the verbs are the things you get to do. And so under Workday Cloud Platform, we divide that into three main pillars. Connect, which is our API frameworks and API technology, as well as some of our cloud connect capabilities and offerings, right? The prebuilt connectors that you can use in integrations. So, that leads to the second one, which is our Integrate pillar, which is the capability to build integrations. And again, when I define integrations, I think they can mean a lot of things. But for me, integrations are the ability to synchronize between systems. We're not talking about bit-by-bit chatter. We're talking about, hey, I've got to take a whole load of data out of Workday, synchronize it with another system, or take a whole of data from another system and synchronize it into Workday. That's what our, our integrate suite is really great at. And then the last verb is Extend. Extend is really the ability to build apps, right? And the ability to build-- and I wanted to make sure we understand that apps aren't just-- a lot of times you think of building apps as, like, I'm gonna build a UI in Workday. That's great. That's what Extend is great at. You can build a seamless UI. But there is this other idea of apps being headless and the fact that you can build logic inside Workday, publish APIs or push events outside of Workday, and maybe you're interoperating with another system. Maybe the UI isn't in Workday. Maybe it's a behind-the-scenes thing where nobody's actually touching a screen, but you're actually doing some programmatic or transactive behavior.

Krist: So, the functionality.

Grippo: Yeah. So that's the idea of Workday Cloud Platform, Connect, Extend, Integrate. And I'll say there's two subcategories there because we're at DevCon, and we wanna be, you know, inclusive and understand that the, the Workday platform is wider than just what my team works on. And I'd say there's two more elements to that which would be analyzed, which is our Prism products and, you know, everything we're able to do with data. And then of course on the other side, what I would call the experience, and as a verb, you are experiencing something.  but, you know, things like Journeys which allow you to tailor the home page, you know. Or things like our Natural Workspace, you know, capabilities around Slack or Teams or things like that.

Krist: Right. And then, I mean, organizational agility is the foundation for success. And how are Workday developers at the center of agility and adaptability for the business?

Grippo: Yeah. I really like this one. So, I know we're getting the word out there on this, but this whole power to adapt language and then the way we describe the Workday platform and the power to adapt, that plugs into this agility concept. Now, at its base, it's like you're buying applications that are incredible. These applications can adapt. You can configure them. They're already something that can be mutated quite a bit. And, you know, on top of that, if you look at that, we have this architecture that we show you here is the core. Now, there's a ring around the outside of the architecture. And that I the developer frontier of that power to adapt. And in there, you'll see the Connect, Extend, and Integrate. Right?

Krist: Right

Grippo: And so how do I think about the developers in this mix? I'll bring it to this. My daughter is really into Marvel stuff right now. She's brought me into this whole Marvel thing. I'm watching all these Marvel movies with her.

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: As I was thinking about this question, I was thinking, well, like, you know the Marvel movies, you've got all the people that take care of stuff when it's within the bounds of normal parameters. Right?

Krist: Right.

Grippo: You've got, you know, the police and the military in these movies, like, they can handle most of the problems. And that's kind of like the base of Workday. You have that agility, the ability to hold things together. But sometimes you gotta bring the Avengers in because stuff gets really crazy. [laughter] And so to me, the, the developers are the Avengers of the Workday world, the Workday world of agility. They're the ones on the frontier. They're just like, "Now we're gonna do something really special. Now we're gonna do something that really stretches the boundaries of possibility."

Krist: Right.

Grippo: That's how they fit into the equation of agility and adaptation. It's like the whole thing can do it, but when you're out there on the edge, when you're really on the edge of exploration, on the edge of stretching the boundaries of what Workday does, then you're, you're in the Avenger category.

Krist: That's great. And what's interesting is, personally speaking, I think a lot of us thought we were adaptable and agile, but then once-in-a-century events kind of forced us all to do things differently. I mean, do you ever think about the timing of Extend and Workday Cloud Platform? In a way, it was there, you know, right time, right place.

Grippo: Well, the way I think about it is I think even without what happened in the world, we were right time, right place. This is something Workday needs to do. This is a way that the industry is going. Things are moving away from the sort of holistic, everything works in one box, you're buying the box, and now we're seeing these systems, these SAS systems are starting to open and interconnect. And, and so it's a direction we needed to go. Now, what I will tell you is what's happened in the world and the immediate urgent need it brought to the equation highlighted that fact.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: And so I think we were already plugged into the right stream, but it was amazing to see how-- an example, like, vaccine management, which we talk about a lot. And I like to not totally focus on that because I want people to understand that there's a breadth of things you can do with Extend and with the platform.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: But boy, was that an example of, wow, look at how this tooling allowed our customers to just fly in on something that was ill-defined, so it was hard to put it in base product because everybody had a different conception of how am I gonna handle this? What does the regulation mean?  what's our version of doing that where we are at our enterprise? Combined with we only have a month to deliver this, combined with the type of data that you're managing and dealing with. That sort of was a perfect storm to just say look at that example. That's-- Extend was really able to step in and help in that instance. And we had big customers using that. We had big customers. One month, up and running, hundreds of thousands of employees using it.

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: And it held up under the pressure. So, it kinda goes back to the advantage of the tooling that we're providing is we talk about the trust, the system, the security, everything you get when you're using Extend because you're using Workday while you're using Extend and how vaccine management really just highlighted that, allowed people to move with agility and with trust.

Krist: Well, and it's interesting when you talked about how there was some ambiguity, but that couldn't stop you from needing to build functionality that people really needed. I was talking to a Workday developer earlier, and he said, you know, that's the thing is we can embrace the ambiguity and iterate, and it's not set in stone. We can improve the functionality of something we built in Extend. And it's almost perfect for those ambiguous situations. And I'm sure there's plenty of unambiguous situations. When you said ambiguous, I found that really interesting because a developer, that's a huge plus to them.

Grippo: Absolutely. A lot of customers are saying, "Oh, we did this one thing in this one area, and then we were able to lift that pattern and that idea up and actually apply it to all other domains." See a lot of that too, which is, like, "Oh. Now we see other problems that we can solve."

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: Yeah. It's fascinating stuff watching this go down.

Krist: Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about true cloud architecture and why it's important for a business to invest in a true cloud architecture? And what are we talking about when we're talking about true cloud architecture?

Grippo: Well, there's a lot of stuff there, right?

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: You can go back to the original Workday story of because of the way we architect, because it's true cloud, there's everybody on one version, there is the security model, there's the technol-- unified technology model. And I hope most people who are Workday customers, who are thinking about Workday, kinda understand that. We've been talking about that for a long time. But I think the other thing, and, and I know that, you know, we were here at DevCon, and I've heard Jim talking about this, Jim Stratton talking about this this morning, so it reminded me, and I, I really like it, which is this thing we forget, which is what you should be able to ask out of your true cloud vendor and what you should expect is number one, we expect to have a long relationship with the customer. If you're buying into Workday, you're buying into something that you're running for years and years and years.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: This is not something that is going to stale and age. And can you ask this of your vendor? You know, are you buying a house or are you buying an airplane? And what I mean by that is most companies, if they're going to refresh their software, it's like doing a renovation on your house.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: You gotta move out. You gotta move out of the house, and then they go and they tear it up. You go stay in a hotel. And it takes longer than you think. And then they rebuild it, and then it's all ready. And you move in, and then you gotta get all the glitches out of it. Right? And then you can start living in it again.

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: At Workday, and, and maybe we're too-- I don't know, we're-- our aspirations are very high, but what we expect of ourselves is that you're renovating an airplane. And so as that airplane is flying, as, as you're on that flight, we have to rapidly change out the engine, change out the seats, update the navigation systems, maybe put a new wing in, but the airplane has to keep flying. And I think that's what's--

Krist: And there's very critical tolerances and rules and regulations and all that.

Grippo: Yeah, all that.

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: No, you're right. And, and that's what we've signed up to do is to-- and I think you should be able to ask that out of your true cloud vendor, "Can I sign up for this?" You're gonna keep me running. You're gonna keep me on the same version. Everybody on the same version. But the technology is gonna morph. It's gonna modernize. It's gonna change right around me as my plane continues to fly. And then if you look at the developer angle on that and you look at the cloud platform, and there's a bunch of devs all around us, adding things to the plane at the same time while it's still flying, and I know those things are gonna continue to run too. And I think we're doing that, and that's pretty amazing. So to me, that's kind of true cloud, at least my current take on it.

Krist: Okay.

Grippo: Yeah.

Krist: And then why should people consider Workday over other tools or technologies in the market?

Grippo: Right. So I'm gonna take it down into the Workday Cloud Platform story. And it, it comes down to three main things. And we talked a little bit about this already, but I'll, I'll talk about it again. And, and that is the first thing, you wanna pick the right place to do something. And when you're leveraging the Workday platform tooling, whether it's Cloud Platform, Integrate, is that the right place? We're not always gonna be the right place, but if you're in the right place, guess what you get? Now, I'll talk about Extend a little bit as an example.

Krist: Mm-hmm.

Grippo: But you have access to the right data without having to pump it out somewhere else. You have access to all the business processes. We talk a lot about the data. We don't talk as much about every single process is available to you in Workday. Hire to retire, cash to close.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: Not just onboarding. Not just some subsegment. Every single process around your people and money lives in Workday. If you're gonna have a development platform, don't you want full access to those processes to be able to weave inside of them, do things that are special, without having to go out to an ancillary system? So that's really important. And then you have the actual technology part of which we allow you to create new security domains, create new business processes in Workday, create new data models in Workday. And it's all fused into the core system as if a developer at Workday built it.

Krist: Hmm.

Grippo: That's pretty powerful.

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: So that's the right place argument. Right place for people and money, right?

Krist: Right.

Grippo: Argument number two, guess what you get when you do that? We talked about this already. You get the trust, same security model, all the editability, all the version safety, the thing we talked about with the airplane versus the house. All of this comes along for the ride. You don't have to develop a separate environment. We take care of the environment. We take care of the publish pipeline and the development pipeline. All that is in the box for you. So you get that along for the ride, which is really particularly important in a world where the data you're working with is very sensitive data. This might not be as critical if say, you're working in a different area of the business. And then the last one is the interconnectivity. Right? And that's th-the fact that you get these tools that not only allow you to work within the box, but now we, we allow you to connect out to other systems and become part of the constellation of IT 'cause we know we don't exist standalone at Workday. We know that we're a hub amongst many hubs within the enterprise, and you-- you're not always gonna be working within our world. You're gonna be wanting to interconnect with other systems, whether it's ServiceNow or Salesforce or whatever. It, it might be a hyperscaler like Amazon or [inaudible] Platform. And so that interoperability is really important. So that's the three main advantages.

Krist: And then can you talk a little bit about the Workday developer experience, and specifically, how Workday Extend allows them to scale to meet new use cases?

Grippo: Sure. So when we talk about the developer experience, again, the brain will always go to the tech first. And I, I think you've got to start with something else first. The developer experience is bigger than the tech. And I'll take it back to where we are right now, right? We're sitting here at DevCon. I've been sitting downstairs, in these sessions talking to the developers whether it's a customer developer, partner developer. They're lit up.

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: That's developer experience, right? That's the community, learning from each other. I've heard a lot of feedback around this event around “thank you so much for providing a venue for us to really meet our kin and have aa venue in which we can get into the detail around the tooling and really help people see it and understand it.” That's been really amazing to see. And then you kinda go out from there. Like, so creating platforms like this that are experience, people in person experiencing and talking and working together. That's, that's the base of a good, strong developer community. Then you take it a level and you look at things like, hey, we've got a dev site where there's forums where folks can interact with each other. There are tutorials. There's learning environment. There are ways to do quick POCs and, and testing. And having all those tools, that's a really big part of the developer experience. And then the last part of the developer experience is what I call the authoring experience.  and that's-- from a product standpoint, I'm really excited about some of the stuff we're doing there. I mean, one of the things we've done recently, we're starting to move all of our authoring into a pure web environment. So any developer can build without having to download a plugin or an IDE or-- you know, full web experience. And that's gonna open up all kinds of possibilities for the developer experience to really amplify because then we have the ability to really tailor that experience, bring more convenience into it, bring more simplicity into it. I'm very excited about that. And maybe as we leave off at the end of the session, I'll tell you a little bit more about that.

Krist: I would love to hear a little bit more about it now because the Workday developers that I've talked to have just been so excited to be able to so clearly and quickly add business value. And it's funny because being a Workday developer, it almost means being a little bit of a detective to really understand what the business needs, and then being a problem solver. So, I would love to hear more about this environment.

Grippo: Well, I'll take this in a different direction. You know, this, this conference, it ends with a hackathon.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: And all this new stuff that we're bringing to the hackathon, you know, a lot of times you go to a conference and people say, "Hey, there's this great new thing. There's this great new thing. There's a great new thing." And maybe you'll see it in eight months. You'll see it in a year. We're coming to this conference and saying, "There's this great new thing. There's a-- and guess what? All you developers that are participating in the hackathon--"

Krist: Tomorrow.

Grippo: "--you get access to that tomorrow."

Krist: Wow.

Grippo: You know? And because you're gonna see the real thing working, you know that we're on a very quick time frame to get out into production to you. You know, we're talking about six to eight months, not a year, not-- this is not future talk. This is real stuff.  and so there's many categories there. Like, we've opened up MLAPIs around OCR you can access. You can send data into our ML capability and, and have you, you know, send, send images in, and have the OCR read the images. All the new authoring stuff I just talked about, we're unveiling that so the developers will get their hands on a full web authoring experience. There's a number of features in orchestration about some of that interoperability we talked about. API publishing, you know, BP triggering a partnership that-- where we've built some convenience connections with the UI pass so you can then reach out of Workday in those business processes and trigger all kinds of automation that UI path offers. But-- and I'll, I'll, I'll kinda finish off with what triggered when you said tell me about some of this developer experience [inaudible] what we're doing with Workday Graph API.

Krist: Okay.

Grippo: And this now, a single pane of glass, a graph API that allows you to work with Workday through,  an interface where you can access the data, you can both write into Workday and read out of Workday, but in a way that is combining all of the previous sort of technologies that have been out there. You know, we, we have a large library of sub APIs, a library of REST APIs. we have a gazillion reporting data sources.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: Graph puts a holistic front on top of all that and lets you interrogate it in a way that's much more efficient and centralized. I knew that was a big one, but I was surprised at how excited the developers were about that.

Krist: Wow.

Grippo: And for obvious reasons. But that's been a really huge one.

Krist: Wow. That's great. So what's next for Workday Extend that we haven't talked about yet?

Grippo: All right. So that's the thing that I said I was gonna save till the end. Maybe this is an ending-type question, usually.

Krist: Okay.

Grippo: So we talked about the developer experience. And, for the most part, Extend is really a toolset where you have to have some development chops. And, I expect that to continue. I mean, there's a wide spectrum of what developers do with Extend. You can go back to the early days of Extend and Workday Cloud Platform, and the first apps that were built, because it was an early stage [tech?], were very simple. I always bring up the-- we built the example, bring your dog to work day.

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: [Vocation?]. And it's a very simple-- I can have a set of employees, and somebody needs to sign up. They need to enter a little bit of data, hit submit. Right? The transaction clears.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: On the other extreme, we have these incredibly complex applications that our customers are building around. "Hey, I have a particular performance process that is very bespoke to my organization. And we're actually gonna build a whole performance suite that utilizes the base performance capability of our applications but brings a whole new take on how to do it," something Workday would never build because it's very particular to that one customer. Or, you know, in the world of finance, things where, "Hey, we're bringing two systems together." We have-- you know, PGA is a great example of that. They're an example up on our, our website, I believe. And,  it's the Golfers' Association.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: They run tournaments. They have a whole tournament system out there that manages who wins and loses in these tournaments. And they actually use that system to design-- they have to pay out the players. So then they use Extend to bring their tournament system together with Workday Financials and payroll to manage those payouts. So that's a sort of an example of that constellation. So you get that level of complexity.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: That's a very complicated applications that have a lot of moving parts all the way down to these simple little fill out a form.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: What we're working on now is that left-hand side of the-- if you think of this as a left and right thing, and on the left is the simplicity, and on the right are these very complex things. And on the right-hand side, very sophisticated development teams, and our customers are using partners to help them with that. On the left-hand side, I wanna be able to get to the point where someone who is not technical can build one of these very simple apps in under two minutes and publish it without a developer anywhere nearby. Or even use that as a way to maybe build the very beginnings of the app and then say, "Let me give it to a developer now," and they can take it and, and make it more complex.

Krist: Doing a rough draft.

Grippo: And so that's what's next.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: I mean, there's lots of other nexts--but that's a big next that I'm really excited about is this idea of very simple things quickly built with lots of utility,  without having to have a, a degree in engineering.

Krist: Wow.

Grippo: I think that's gonna be pretty exciting.

Krist: Yeah. That's very exciting.

Grippo: You know, and then I would say, you know, , there's all kinds of other nexts. I mean, you're gonna see more and more convergence of all the tooling.

Krist: Yeah.

Grippo: So thinking about that Workday Cloud Platform umbrella--it's all the verbs. It's experience, it's analyze, it's extend, it's integrate, it's connect. And you'll start to see us continue to start to either show examples to the world of how you use these things in conjunction with each other, or actually update the tooling to be more unified so that you can use those tools as a unified set.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: so I think that's exciting. And then I'd say the last thing to keep your eye out on is just from an Extend standpoint, we're really going fully regional and data resident everywhere. So, you know, that's a big-- that's been a big lift for us over the last year.

Krist: That's a big undertaking.

Grippo: Yeah. So, we're now live in Europe, fully resident and regional in the EU Region with Extend. We were always available across the globe, but many of our customers are sensitive with whether data is moving. And so if you were in Europe, you would have to still use, you know, US,  based installation of Extend.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: now, we have that full regionality. And you're gonna see further movements for federal for Asia, etc. over the next year.

Krist: Wow. Great. Congratulations. What's been your biggest surprise here at the first in-person DevCon?

Grippo: The biggest surprise is just how much people really appreciate this event. I'm, uh-- you know, you hope that's gonna happen. But you never really know.

Krist: Right.

Grippo: And it has really resonated. I mean, people are not complimenting me or, you know, I'm getting unsolicited feedback, and people are really happy to be here. And it's that-- goes back to that, "This is really great. You're finally giving me a platform and a place where the developer is represented, that developer persona." And people are really lit up about it. And so I, I probably should say I'm not surprised by that, but I s-- I really am. Like, I'm really delighted and really stoked about that.

Krist: That's great.

Grippo: Yeah.

Krist: That's very cool. All right. Well, thanks for joining me, Matt. I, I really enjoyed our conversation.

Grippo: Yeah, I did too. Thanks for having me.

Krist: You bet. And thank you for joining us, listeners, for this episode of the Workday Podcast. You can subscribe at any of your favorite podcasting tools or platforms. Thank you.