Workday Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Second Year in a Row

We’re excited to announce that once again, Workday has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large, and Global Enterprises based on our ability to execute and completeness of vision.

This marks the second year in a row Workday has earned this recognition. We believe this reflects our ongoing commitment to delivering a financial management system that helps our customers manage risk, identify new opportunities, and keep pace with change. We’re especially delighted that Workday achieved the furthest position for completeness of vision.

The pace of business and the demands placed on finance keep advancing at a rapid clip. We understand that finance teams are being asked to take on an ever-more strategic role and help guide the business with insight so that challenges—whether competitive, geopolitical, or economic—can be seized as opportunities.

That’s why at Workday, we keep innovating to deliver the capabilities you need to be more empowered. From building in more intelligence with machine learning, to expanding analytics, to delivering a more conversational interface, we continue to add depth and breadth to our cloud-based finance system, Workday Financial Management, with every release. And in combination with Workday Prism Analytics, Workday Benchmarking, and Workday Planning, we’re charting a vision that meets the demands of the future of finance.

And, as I’ve discussed previously, the technology foundation of your financial management system matters more than ever before. Our customers have told us having the right financial management system has made the difference between thriving through change and being left behind. We continue to listen to and learn from our customers—a focused passion of mine—and continuously improve Workday thanks to their valuable feedback.

Ease-of-use has been a guiding principle for Workday since the beginning. We’ve taken inspiration from the best of the consumer web and applied it to the enterprise, knowing that software should make it easier to get work done—not get in the way.

We continue to make investments in the core technology platform that underpins Workday’s applications. Workday Financial Management customers will be able to take advantage of advances in machine learning through knowledge, vision, and language services that detect patterns in data, extract textual information from visual data, and enable natural language interactions.

As an example, we’ve made mobile expense reporting even easier in Workday 30 by introducing optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of receipts, powered by machine learning. Using your mobile phone, you can take a picture of a receipt and the relevant information will be automatically entered into your expense report.

Workday will also empower users to interact through a more conversational user interface and Workday bot that will allow you to collaborate around specific tasks and flows. We also realize that the easiest place to get something done is where you already are, which is why you’ll be able to interact with the conversational language UI through other applications that integrate with Workday.

And chat capabilities in Worksheets enable better collaboration in Workday Planning, so users can comment, respond to questions, and see updates from other planning participants in real time, directly within the Worksheet.

The era of basing business decisions on gut feel is long gone. Finance teams need to be able to make quick, informed decisions based on data. Legacy systems, which require complex and separate business intelligence tools for analysis, don’t provide that ability. That’s why Workday was built with the power to transact and analyze in the same system, with reporting and analytics available throughout.

We’ve continued to add more ways for our customers to gain deeper insights. With the launch of Workday Prism Analytics, our customers can now combine Workday and non-Workday data for deeper operational insights. This lets customers correlate financial data in Workday with information from other systems, such as allowing a financial planning analyst at a retailer to dive into reports that combine financial data with point-of-sale information to see profitability by store, region, or other dimensions. This self-service data discovery allows regular users to drill deeply into data for the insights they need, without relying on data scientists.

I’m excited about where intelligent automation will take finance in the future. Yet we’ve only begun to scratch the surface as to what intelligent automation can do. We recognize the tremendous potential of these technologies to redefine finance and are committed to deploying them in a way that’s true to our values.

As we reflect on this recognition, I know deeply that our success is fueled in partnership with our customers. Whether you’re a long-standing customer like Hulu, or have recently joined our customer community, such as Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Denny’s, or Oriental Bank, thank you for your ongoing support. We’ll continue to make investments in our products, leveraging the latest technologies and adding capabilities that move you ahead. And we’ll continue to do so in a way that’s true to Workday and our vision of shared success with our customers.

The best is yet to come.

“Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises,” Analyst(s): Van Decker, John E. | Anderson, Robert P. | Guay, Mike, May 29, 2018.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.