In Our Customers’ Words: Driving Better Business Decisions and Growth

When we talk to Workday customers, what we most appreciate is when they tell us how we’ve helped drive their businesses forward. It lets us know we’re succeeding on a core objective for our products since the beginning: Applications that enable our customers to make business decisions that lead to their growth.

Since 2005, we’ve designed Workday applications specifically for this purpose. They are built on what the market now defines as hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) system architectures with in-memory computing (IMC). That’s a lot of technical jargon, but it means we’ve architected our applications so that business leaders can quickly access real-time data in meaningful context.

Workday’s finance, HR, and analytics applications live together on this foundation, so all data, and the tools for gaining insights into that data, are in one system. This foundation has made it possible to bring in new innovations in data analytics, including Apache Hadoop and Spark, intelligent data classification, and machine learning methodologies, to draw even more insights out of data and move into exciting new areas such as predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Here’s why our customers find this so valuable: The only way business leaders can gain immediate insights into their finances and talent—to make the decisions that grow their businesses—is through the ability to access and analyze real-time data in their organizations’ core finance and HR applications.

Legacy enterprise applications built on architectures dating back more than 30 years cannot be reengineered to work the way Workday applications do—a legacy vendor would literally have to rip up its whole foundation and start fresh. In addition, a vendor that bolts together a bunch of acquired applications, whether they are in the cloud or not, will never provide its customers this kind of seamless access to business insights.

What does this mean for customers? I’ll share with you some of what they’ve told us:

Allied Global: Now has a single, accurate view of relevant information for better decision-making, consistent global numbers and approaches, simplified chart of accounts, and faster closing and year-end audit.

Flextronics: HR has been freed up to focus on strategic projects, and to provide data to business leaders to help them make data-driven decisions.

TripAdvisor: Now has enriched business insights and real-time reporting, and business-process configurability for improved agility and responsiveness to change.

These are encouraging words, and provide some insight into why Workday has achieved a 97% customer satisfaction rating. As a company, we will always remain focused on our customers’ satisfaction, and what we can do to drive their businesses forward.