Workday eyes expansion via Workday Planning, Learning, Student
Workday is launching for general availability a trio of products that it hopes will dramatically boost its footprint and addressable market.
At its Workday Rising conference, the company launched Workday Learning, Workday Planning and Workday Student.
"These are huge markets," said Leighanne Levensaler, senior vice president of product at Workday. Indeed, education, planning and workforce training and education add up to a nearly $5 billion total addressable market. "The products are built from the ground up to replace broken processes and re-imagined them the way they should work."
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Workday had preannounced the trio of products at previous Rising conferences and now they are generally available the company will actively be cross-selling them. The strategy for Workday is relatively simple: Gain a foothold in an enterprise and then expand. Workday started in human capital management bridged to financials and now is adding two key areas to bolster those efforts with Workday Learning and Workday Planning.
Levensaler, like other Workday executives, emphasized the company's unified architecture, integration and code.
Of the launches, Workday Planning has the most green field since many customers still plan on spreadsheets. Workday Planning provides a familiar spreadsheet format, but allows for collaboration, real-time forecasting and data that reflects where the business is now.
The key points in Workday Planning are:
- Tools to plan on an ongoing basis with analytics and visualization built in.
- Baseline plans via historical data, real-time information and human resources data.
- Forecasting to analyze an investment's impact on revenue, spend and profitability.
- Staffing models to support growth and expansion plan evaluations.
Workday Learning is designed to ride shotgun with the company's core HR software. What's notable with Learning is that it relies heavily on video and peer sharing of knowledge. Levensaler said that the design of Workday Learning took design cues from Netflix and YouTube. "Learning is hyper personal and has a heavy use of video that's built into the fabric of Workday," she said.
Key features for Workday Learning include:
- Contextual content that aligns with an employee's career goals.
- Campaign management for targeted employee groups. An HR leader could target managers with remote workers with content.
- Analytics to judge the returns on learning activities.
- The catch for Workday Learning is that it'll compete with the well-established Cornerstone OnDemand for accounts.
As for Workday Student, the runway will take longer given that education institutions generally don't upgrade during the school year, which just started. Workday Student was developed over three years and is designed to appeal to students who are digital natives and provide multi-screen access to plan schedule and courses.
Workday Student was designed along with more than 40 institutions. Workday has launched a recruiting module with early adopter customers, but Workday Student will add records, administration, recruiting and other features.
Features of Workday Student include:
- Simplified curriculum management and reporting and analytics for a registrar.
- Academic advisement tools along with analytics. Students will receive alerts, reminders and notifications throughout the academic planning cycle.
- Automated financial aid adjustments in real time with forecasts.
- Student financials in a single system to combine obligations, enrollment and residency status.