Partners central to Workday accelerators
The industry cloud push plays to the strengths of consulting and IT services providers that have historically maintained industry expertise, often organizing practices along vertical market lines. For cloud providers, such partners provide the skills and digital transformation experience to bolster their industry strategies.
Workday’s Industry Accelerators, which debuted at the company’s Workday Rising event, draw upon partners to address the demand for digital transformation, especially in the finance and operations areas.
“Digital transformation for the office of the CFO is a big topic right now,” said Pete Schlampp, chief strategy officer at Workday. “What we are trying to do with industry accelerators is say, ‘We’ve got an onramp for you in your industry.’”
The Workday ecosystem currently offers accelerators for the banking/capital markets, healthcare, insurance and technology sectors. Partners contribute accelerators in a couple of ways. For one, they create pre-defined configurations geared toward a specific industry. Workday’s business process framework lets partners ply their industry knowledge to configure the company’s SaaS applications.
This differs from customizing software to meet industry needs, which is an approach some industry clouds take, Schlampp noted. Workday keeps all its customers on the same code base, which he said provides for a common data model that enables machine learning, better automation and improved personalization.
A second type of accelerator is a connector that integrates Workday with an industry-oriented, third-party application.
Lastly, Workday and its partners will co-innovate on what Schlampp described as “packaged offerings” residing on Workday’s cloud. The company, working with partners, plans to publish 25 such offerings this year, many of which will be industry specific. Co-innovation relationships have become increasingly important in the building of industry clouds.