This continues my conversation with Workday’s Emily McEvilly and Webb Armentrout on Workday’s SI partner ecosystem.
Post implementation services
In the heyday of legacy software, post-implementation upgrades, hosting, application management turned out to be a fairly sizable long-tail expense for customers. The quality also turned out to be pretty poor because customers would sign up for years and the integrators would just have young staff supporting them, quite often offshore. So I asked the Workday team, how they monitor AMS around their products?
“We think of customers on a broad spectrum of self-sufficiency,” said McEvilly. “Some really want to be self-sufficient, drive innovation and manage all the systems of their own. Others might just need ad hoc support if they have turnover or maybe they're going to run the system,” she said. “At the other end of the spectrum, we have organizations that love to outsource everything. We have customers across the spectrum, in all sizes and we’ve designed our ecosystem to support those different components.”
Workday as a whole seems to be taking a much more active role in optimization services, borrowing a page from Salesforce’s playbook. At Workday Rising in Orlando the company announced the general availability of Success Plans, which offer a mix of education, tools, and services. As McEvilly puts it, “It's a way for Workday to play a more active role in helping customers adopt the features and functions that they already own and that we'd like them to turn on to drive additional value. That's our approach and how we think about AMS type services.”
A growing footprint, vertically and globally
With Workday gaining traction in vertical markets and the company’s global customer base growing nicely Workday’s partner ecosystem has evolved to keep pace. The growth in verticals is as McEvilly puts it, “bread and butter” for the partners. “Because of the way they go to market, partners have an opportunity to differentiate themselves with their IP and thought leadership.” This has helped drive innovation and growth for partners who are able to marry industry specific expertise and IP. McEvilly continued, “We are seeing are partners that have strong vertical practices gravitating towards Workday. In many cases, they’re able to create templates whereby they can demonstrate unique vertical capabilities and then take that to market. In many ways, our partners are helping to lead the way, especially as we continue to push and grow in financials. Financials, at its core is a vertical play.”
Another interesting area for growth and differentiation for partners in the ecosystem can be found with Workday Prism Analytics and with the upcoming general availability of Workday Cloud Platform (WCP.) Armentrout weighed in, “as we continue this vertical ramp up, this becomes the best of both worlds. You've got the methodology that we require of our partners, the framework around the deployment that helps drive that 97% customer satisfaction. Layered on top of that, Workday Prism Analytics and the ability to create templates specifically focused on industry and then the Workday Cloud Platform, it allows the best of both worlds.”
According to McEvilly, partners are already tapping into Workday Prism Analytics to differentiate themselves and provide very specific vertical offerings. “In healthcare, we're offering up some analytics around connecting cost of procedures to doctors and salaries, so you can see profitability. Partners that are really deep in that vertical are thinking of new ways to bring in third-party data via Workday Prism and combine it with data across Workday HCM and financials to show new insights to their customers.”
The last area the Workday team highlighted as a growth driver for verticals which was discussed at the Rising partner panel in Orlando, is software partners. Workday’s SI partners are becoming more adept at connecting with the company’s software partners to provide end-to-end solutions. “We talked about a solution that Accenture built with GoTransverse, which is a billing solution, to solve a very unique industry need,” said McEvilly. “I think, across those three avenues, WCP, Prism and software partners, there is a lot of opportunity for us to drive more business together in the verticals.”
The changing landscape of the SI world
The SI market has seen its share of consolidation over the past few years. One of the things that both Salesforce and Workday had quite a bit of, at least in the beginning, were a lot of smaller, regional firms like the Appirios of the world. Recent times have seen larger SIs gobble up boutique players. This presents a challenge to vendors like Workday, not being able to offer their customer prospects much choice when it comes to an implementation partner.
So, I asked Workday how they balance the partner mix. According to Armentrout, over the past two years Workday has on-boarded seven new partners. “We're very aware of the need to provide a full offering of different partner types including boutiques like Invisors,” he said. “We recently brought in AVAAP as a boutique in the healthcare market and Guidehouse, which was a spinoff from PwC in the state and local government marketplace.” Workday also has boutique partners like BNB in Iberia and Data Dimensions in South Africa.
Armentrout acknowledged that the acquisitions make a big splash when a company like Accenture acquires DayNine or Wipro acquires Appirio (which has since moved over to Alight.) But, as he says, “While that makes a lot of noise, we are behind the scenes continuing to seed and grow the market."
Many SIs tend to be stronger in white collar functions, not operational ones. As Workday gets deeper into verticals and starts to get into operational books of record, I will be interested to see how the ecosystem evolves.
