Unleashing the Power of Innovation with Public Cloud

This post, originally published in September 2023, was updated on June 3, 2024, to include information on an additional expansion of Workday Cloud Offerings.

Born in the cloud—back in 2005, when it was still an uncharted frontier—here at Workday we’re constantly evolving to anticipate, meet, and exceed our customers’ ever-changing expectations.

In the beginning, we invested heavily in our own purpose-built data centers. That’s because the public cloud was just starting and had not yet proven its value for enterprise applications. As time went on, we increasingly used the public cloud for our internal testing and development needs. And in the years since, we’ve seen public cloud services mature by leaps and bounds. This led to our decision to partner with innovative public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to accelerate innovation and time to value for our customers.

Now, we believe substantially expanding our public cloud offerings across multiple enterprise-class vendors will help us continue to deliver unique value to our customers—no matter their size, region, or industry—and give them more opportunities for innovation regardless of regulatory or business drivers.

That’s why Workday solutions are now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, enabling Google Cloud and new Workday customers to reduce procurement cycles through a quicker and simpler buying process, including consolidated Google Cloud billing. Purchasing through Google Cloud Marketplace also provides customers with more options to bill against existing Google Cloud commitments, which can help to reduce costs.

We’re also expanding our partnership with AWS. Through this expanded partnership, AWS and Workday will invest in joint go-to-market initiatives to accelerate customer cloud transformation and foster joint innovation. Meanwhile, Workday is leveraging AWS infrastructure and tools to develop and build generative AI capabilities. This means that new and existing Workday customers can now purchase Workday solutions on the AWS Marketplace. 

Having the ability to select from the best capabilities available is vitally important to our customers and for our collective success. That’s why we’re leveraging readily accessible infrastructure services to help us deliver meaningful business value to our customers faster. Let’s take a deeper look at some of these benefits.

Harnessing the Power of Multi-Cloud

The significant capital investments made by public cloud providers and the resulting breadth of functionality is compelling. We aim to take advantage of these capabilities both to enhance the core Workday service as well as to leverage foundational capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). 

By collaborating with public cloud providers, we leverage their extensive infrastructure and proficiencies to enhance our AI services. This enables our customers to use various AI and ML capabilities such as advanced analytics, intelligent automation, and predictive insights—unlocking faster innovation, scalability, and ROI. 

We want to focus our efforts where they bring the greatest value to our customers. In addition to continuing to build cutting-edge capabilities on our own, we also leverage innovation infrastructure from our partners. In other words, Workday features that complement the core Workday service may leverage and integrate with several public cloud providers—providing best-in-class capabilities while protecting customer data and complying with regulatory requirements.

We know, though, that the use of a provider’s cloud services should be approached thoughtfully. While multi-cloud portability is required over time, we’re looking beyond the lowest common denominator of price per unit of compute/storage/networking and instead looking at overall value to our customers’ business. 

Putting Customer Success First

At Workday, we thrive when our customers succeed. That’s why we continuously invest in our engineering to drive toward the highest levels of customer performance, scalability, security, satisfaction, and success. With the above in mind, we’ve come to recognize that the public cloud is the optimal solution for our customers. Leveraging our experience in using the leading public cloud providers for our own purposes has given us the opportunity to build significant in-house expertise and mutual understanding with each of the major providers. 

As we continue to expand our services across the top public cloud providers, we will extend these benefits to our customers. Our goal is to operate seamlessly across all trusted public clouds, maximizing both value and our customers’ ability to innovate. 

For example, leveraging Google Cloud’s Gemini models, users can get answers to questions such as “what are my outstanding liabilities on vendor contracts?,” enabling customers to use natural language to query and get answers to their external documents by building a custom business app with Workday Extend. In one use case, the Document Intelligence API from Workday leverages Google Cloud’s Document AI Custom Extractor to enable businesses to parse and extract information from a wide variety of documents. 

We're also expanding our native integrations with AWS to help developers build and integrate custom apps directly on their Workday data in Workday Extend, a technology platform that helps organizations build customized capabilities, apps, and solutions for finance and people processes. This deeper integration is designed to help customers consolidate systems, respond to unplanned needs, and reduce costs. 

Looking Ahead

We were founded on a revolutionary idea that has since become mainstream: enterprise software should work for the business, not against it. Letting our customers buy and run Workday in the public cloud is an important next step in our journey toward providing continuous innovation. We promise to continue concentrating on helping your business manage and grow its most valuable assets—people, finances, and data—and letting our partners do what they do best: hyperscaling business processes. As we forge ahead, we’re excited to continue to deliver to our customers new opportunities to unlock greater benefits while seamlessly running Workday.