A little over a week ago, I traveled west to participate in Workday’s annual industry analyst event – now appropriately rebranded the Workday Innovation Summit. As has been the tradition now for several years, the event was held at the beautiful Cavallo Point Lodge, in Sausalito, CA, just below the Golden Gate Bridge.
While much of the day was spent focusing on Workday’s continued innovation across its HCM and Finance application suites, growing analytics and Cloud Platform capabilities, and AWS support – the theme of extracting greater and greater value for customers, and augmenting executive decision making through machine learning was central to the day. To this end, Aneel Bhusri, Workday’s CEO helped kick-off and frame the day by emphasizing that “machine learning is the fundamental technology of the future.”
The good news is that Workday already has a powerful and unified platform that supports many of the key threads of 21st century architecture. Importantly, I came away with a sense that Workday is taking a very realistic approach to their machine learning (ML) investments – focusing on augmenting the user experience, rather than as a replacement – as it builds out a portfolio of algorithm’s that can be applied to a range of business use cases. I’ve just loved the Phil Mickelson “Business Caddy” ads Workday has been running for the past 6-9 months that emphasize, in a non-technical way, machine learning as supportive to executive decision making.
Fundamental to the successful execution of this strategy has been a focus on extracting more and more value from the data that Workday already manages, as well as helping it increasingly become a hub that leverages a broad range of enterprise and external data.
I really liked what I saw in regard to the emergence of a single data access layer and analytics engine (see chart) that will help coordinate all of the data (and machine learning services) across its now extended family of products. While the initial use-case will no doubt bring Adaptive Insights into the “Power of One,” the longer-term implications of Workday’s vision for a single reporting architecture could help the company more quickly integrate potential future (functional) acquisitions as well.
I look forward to learning more about this initiative at the Adaptive Insights event in Las Vegas later this month. In closing, I’d like to share how impressed I always am by how well-run this event is, and how open and frank the entire Workday team is in both sharing and receiving feedback about its future plans. This year was no exception. Well done.
