It’s taken a while, but Workday is finally seeing the light about offering its business-applications platform to third-party developers as a cloud service.
The Dublin, Calif.-based human resources and financial services software maker revealed July 11 that it is making most of its core technology available on a subscription basis for those customers who see value in building their own Workday-connected software. They could build their own specific industry-type features or entire new applications, if needed.
Workday CEO and co-founder Aneel Bhusri described the plan in blog post July 11, saying that customers have been asking for it for a while. Workday hasn’t been known as much of a developer community-type company, so this is a pivot in its corporate direction.
“They (developers) want to use Workday as a cloud backbone that supports cohesive, digital workflows across multiple business applications—reflective of how their people work and how their businesses operate in today’s hyper-connected, real-time world,” Bhusri wrote.
By opening up the Workday Cloud Platform and entering the PaaS market, Bhusri said, it intends to enable customers and the broader ecosystem to use its platform services to build custom extensions and applications in a hosted environment that can enhance what organizations want to accomplish.
All it can do is initiate more interest in the company’s products. However, other companies are far ahead of Workday in this area.
Prime examples of this do-it-yourself enterprise development market include Salesforce, which has both Force.com and Heroku as PaaS development providers. Amazon has its own development tools for hosted cloud deployments; Microsoft offers a list of software development tools and the support to build software to run in its Microsoft Azure cloud data centers.
Bhusri gave no timetable for the project, but he did say that Workday will have more information at its Workday Rising conference in Chicago in October.
