\\Harnessing the Public Cloud for Ongoing Innovation
By Campbell WebbSVP, Infrastructure Engineering, Workday
At our core, innovation fuels Workday. Born in the cloud—back in 2005, when it was still an uncharted frontier—we’re constantly evolving to anticipate, meet, and exceed our customers’ ever-changing expectations.
In the beginning, we invested heavily in our own purpose-built data centers. That’s because the public cloud was just starting and had not yet proven its value for enterprise applications. We knew the only way we could deliver the highest levels of performance, availability, and security for our customers was to operate our own private cloud.
As time went on, we increasingly used the public cloud for our internal testing and development needs. And in the years since, we’ve seen public cloud services mature by leaps and bounds. This led to our decision to partner with innovative public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and Google Cloud—to accelerate innovation and time-to-value for our customers.
Having the ability to select from the best capabilities available is vitally important to our customers and for our collective success. That’s why we’re leveraging readily accessible infrastructure services to help us deliver meaningful business value faster to our customers. Let’s take a deeper look at some of these benefits.
Workday runs in multiple public clouds. Being multicloud allows us to pick and choose the best capabilities from the innovation race that’s taking place across vendors as they make multibillion-dollar investments in the public cloud.
Indeed, we’ve made our own significant investments into our multicloud framework, which is built on Kubernetes, giving us the ability to leverage the best of public cloud capabilities while providing flexibility to our customers.
We already offer customers the option to run the Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) applications on AWS in the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Germany, and Australia. Additionally, Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM are available on Google Cloud in select markets. Our goal is to continue to add additional products and regions to support our global strategic growth initiatives.
The significant capital investments made by public cloud providers and the resulting breadth of functionality is compelling. We aim to take advantage of these capabilities both to enhance the core Workday service as well as to leverage foundational tools such as AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities.
We’re partnering with public cloud vendors that provide the most innovative, compelling capabilities—such as Amazon Aurora, Google Kubernetes Engine, and more—so that we can deliver competitive advantages to our customers, particularly around AI and ML. By collaborating with public cloud platforms, we leverage their extensive infrastructure and capabilities to enhance our AI services. This enables our customers to use various AI and ML capabilities such as advanced analytics, intelligent automation, and predictive insights—unlocking faster innovation, scalability, and ROI.
A great example of this is with our first iterations of document-understanding applications, such as expense receipt optical character recognition (OCR), which was based on technology that was built in-house. OCR uses AI and ML to streamline a number of manual processes and remove the need for data entry by humans, such as expense receipt scanning and supplier invoice scanning. Today, we now utilize Google Cloud’s Procurement DocAI solution.
Similarly, rather than build and maintain specialized compute and storage infrastructure specifically for machine learning development, we leverage infrastructure services in AWS to meet those needs.
We want to focus our efforts where they bring the greatest value to our customers. In addition to continuing to build cutting-edge capabilities on our own, we also leverage innovation infrastructure from our partners. In other words, Workday features that complement the core Workday service, such as OCR, may leverage and integrate with several public cloud providers—offering best-in-class capabilities while protecting customer data and complying with regulatory requirements.
We know, though, that the use of a provider’s cloud services should be approached thoughtfully. While multicloud portability is required over time, we are looking beyond the lowest common denominator of price per unit of compute/storage/networking and instead looking at overall value to our customers’ business.
At Workday, we thrive when our customers succeed. That’s why we’re continuously investing in our engineering to drive toward the highest levels of customer performance, scalability, security, satisfaction, and success.
And, we’re proud to share that users can continue to interact with Workday during maintenance windows when deployed in the public cloud. We also fully intend to operate, expand, and enhance our data centers for years to come. Customers using a Workday data center will see the same commitment to customer service and ongoing innovation that they’ve come to expect from Workday.
At the same time, we recognize that the public cloud is the optimal solution for many customers. Leveraging our experience in using the leading public cloud providers for our own purposes has given us the opportunity to build significant in-house expertise and mutual understanding with each of the major providers.
As we continue to expand our services across the top public cloud providers, we will extend these benefits to our customers. Our goal is to operate seamlessly across all trusted public clouds, maximizing both value and our customers’ ability to innovate.
We were founded on a revolutionary idea that has since become mainstream: enterprise software should work for the business, not against it. Offering the ability to run Workday in the public cloud for our customers is an important next step in our journey toward providing continuous innovation. In most instances, new customers are already using the public cloud. Our next goal is to work with select existing customers who can quickly and significantly benefit from a public cloud migration. As we forge ahead, we are excited to continue to deliver our customers new opportunities to unlock greater benefits while running Workday seamlessly.
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