Workday to Mobilize HCM - Integration vs. Customization (
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One area where Workday fails to entirely satisfy customer demand is
customization. Once the bugbear of on-demand systems because of the multitenant
architecture of SAAS (software as a service), Salesforce.com developed Apex as
a Java-like programming language that gives Salesforce enough control over
individual customizations to ensure that a given customization doesn't break
the entire application.
At present, Workday doesn't offer anything like this. Instead, it has broken
the application down into discrete workflow process pieces, called the Business
Process Framework, which customers can cobble together. Bhusri said this gets
them 85 to 90 percent of the way toward the customization they need, a
trade-off he said they're willing to make because of the other benefits of the
application framework.
Would Workday create something like Apex to allow full customization?
"We could go to that down the road," he said. But for the time being,
integration will have to do as a substitute for full customization.
SAAS vendors like to claim that they have to earn their money every month,
and that because they're just providing a service, there's no vendor lock-in.
Well, I've had plenty of customers tell me that's not true—there's far too much
pain involved in backing out of a big SAAS deal.
But Bhusri told me that Workday has a built-in
incentive to keep customers happy. It gets paid by the year—not the month—and
not only does it not earn a return on its investment with the customer until
the fourth year of the contract, but customers will pay more per seat in the
later years of the contract. In other words, Workday has every interest in keeping
its customers happy enough to stick around for the later years of the contract.
Enterprise Applications 
