![]() ![]() Here are a few of the sessions I attended: While I’m not a software engineer (I did do coding in Fortran, Cobol, and DB2 years ago), I did learn a lot about some of the new tools. Just as you use Excel or PowerPoint to “build” what you need as an individual, you can now use Workday to “build” whatever you need that spans many employees or systems in your company. So this opportunity, essentially, is everywhere. Each eliminates spreadsheets or other paper processes. Over the years they’ve moved from query and reporting applications to complex transactional applications built on Workday. They do things like help employees administer their tuition reimbursement, other forms of leave, and things that the company used to do by hand. She learned, over a few years of hard work, how to code, use, test, and deploy these apps and is now proudly showing them off. SunLife, for example, has built more than ten new applications on top of Workday and the developer who did much of the work started as a configuration manager. Many corporate developers were also talking about their work. Again I walked away thinking “this is a whole new vertical application for Workday,” something that will help the company grow. The engineer showed us the workflows, the application design, and how they have been working with clients to bring it to market. Workday is building this system in partnership with its clients and using Workday Prism Analytics and Workday Extend for implementation. It’s a massively important application that every bank must use. The treasury department of that bank wants to look at these thousands of assets in the face of different interest rate changes, future scenarios, and market segments. Every time a bank issues a loan or takes a deposit or issues a CD, there are a series of financial transactions that must be accounted for. Wes Fisher, a senior Workday engineer discussed the company’s two-year effort to build a massive financial application for Asset Market Pricing and Profitability called FTP (Funds Transfer Pricing). What they essentially built is a vertical application for Workday. All these transactional steps eventually result in revenue or expense for the insurance company, so the PwC team built a careful integration for each step. Consider, for example, how an auto repair shop creates an “estimate,” which then results in a “final invoice,” which includes the cost of parts and services, with many parts supplied by others. Their client, which appears to be a large insurance company, wanted to integrate its financial management with the huge network of auto repair shops around the world.Īs I listened to their discussion I realized they were really building an entire vertical application that deeply integrates with Workday. One group of developers from PwC, for example, built an entire “shop management” application that integrates with Workday Financials. So most of the developers I met there had lots of experience with Workday, and the company spends lots of time teaching them, supporting them, and promoting the work they do. Since the system has many proprietary features (as do the other cloud platforms), developers have to get to know how these APIs work. So this is a hot space and lots of people are looking for these skills. Right now there are approximately 3,500 certified Workday developers in the world and LinkedIn alone shows more than 15,000 such jobs open. ![]() While most companies think of it as an application, the platform itself has more than 2,000 application programming interfaces (APIs) that let customers or partners access data, create and orchestrate transactions, integrate other systems, or build additional functionality. You have to think about Workday as a platform like Google, AWS, or Azure. Well, this week they rolled out many of the tools that make this happen, so I’ll briefly discuss them here. Several weeks ago Aneel Bhusri the Co-Founder, Co-CEO and Chairman, made a comment that in order for Workday to grow into its $10 Billion ambitions, the company will need partners to build more vertical applications on top of the platform. And this strategy has huge and significant implications. The Workday platform is a marvel of technology, and over the last few years the company has been opening it up as a platform, a set of APIs, and a place for partners and developers to build new things. Let me start with a simple reminder: for all its strategy, sales, and marketing, Workday is essentially a software company. This week I spent a day at Workday’s DevCon, the company’s fast-growing application developer conference, and there is a lot to talk about.
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