Enterprise cloud apps company Workday is adding big-data tools in its next release, allowing firms to mix large volumes of diverse outside data with internal information for HR and financial reporting.
In Workday 20, which becomes generally available this week with 200 new features, HR executives will for example be able to combine external salary surveys and remuneration data with inhouse figures when preparing competitive analyses for the board.
“Simply, we’re saying now anything from the outside world can be sucked in and correlated with Workday HR and financial data,” Workday Europe CTO Annrai O’Toole said.
“In essence, we’re making it easier for people to connect to all these third party-data sources and bring them into the Workday world and then use our inherent reporting capabilities to build meaningful dashboards and analytics,” he said.
According to O’Toole, by adding big-data analytics, Workday is creating a unified system that exploits its own in-memory computing technology and avoids the underlying problems created by having to use separate business-intelligence systems.
“As they bring this data in, all the reporting capabilities inside Workday are instantly usable. The unified security model that everything sits in, all our abilities to deliver this onto mobile devices — all that comes with the big-data analytics. They’re not stepping outside the Workday world to do this,” O’Toole said.
