Workday CEO Carl Eschenbacher admitted to Techzine that for years, the company prevented customers from creating effective integrations with Workday. The so-called “walled garden” was a deliberate strategy. Workday was afraid that other parties would run off with the data. Workday has now opted for an open platform, where integrations are much easier.
Techzine had heard from several customers that integrating with Workday is not easy. It is extremely difficult to extract data from Workday. We confronted Eschenbacher with this during our conversation.
It is not often that the CEO of a billion-dollar company openly admits that his company deliberately created obstacles for customers. We did not entirely expect his answer. “We were a bit closed,” said Eschenbacher. So Workday deliberately made it difficult to extract data. “We were nervous that they would extract it, put it in a cloud data warehouse, and then bypass us by running an application or AI on top of the data.”
Workday Data Cloud opens up platform
Workday has recently added many APIs to make its products more accessible to third parties. This is necessary because the rise of AI solutions means that more APIs are needed. In this respect, a significant shift is taking place, with the company moving from a closed system to an open platform. The era of the walled garden is over.
Read also: Workday Data Cloud gives you direct access to HR and financial data
The most important announcement during Workday Rising in San Francisco on this point is the introduction of the Workday Data Cloud. It now offers zero-copy integrations with Snowflake, Databricks, and Salesforce. We have heard through the grapevine that there is more to come. It makes it possible to use and analyze Workday data in other solutions as well. In fact, exactly what they were so afraid of before.
They are now opening the door because the future of SaaS is entirely AI-driven, and AI does not work without data. Therefore, they must make the data available. This is good news for parties that want to integrate at a deeper level. All data can now be easily extracted from Workday. Thanks to zero-copy integrations, the data does not need to be copied, its even possible to run SQL queries directly at the Workday Data Cloud. Many customers will be very happy with this step, as it removes a huge frustration in integrating Workday solutions in existing IT stacks.