Workday Previews Planning and Budgeting Cloud Application

Six Mistakes that Lead to Poor Enterprise Software Adoption

As part of an effort to expand the appeal of its financial application portfolio delivered via the cloud, Workday today announced Workday Planning, a planning, budgeting and forecasting application that it plans to deliver in 2016; it shares access to the same records used across the rest of the Workday software-as-a-service (SaaS) application portfolio.

Rather than requiring budget planners to access an entirely separate application environment, Leighanne Levensaler, senior vice president of products at Workday, says Workday Planning is designed to be a natural extension to the Workday SaaS platform. The end goal is not only to make it simpler to generate budget documents, but also to make sure that the data in those reports is based on the exact same data already stored in Workday SaaS applications in order to ensure the business as a whole is making decisions based on both the latest and most accurate data available.

Like most providers of SaaS applications, Workday is increasingly blurring the lines between applications to provide a better user experience. Most of the usage of a planning and budgeting application is obviously tied to the Workday suite of financial applications. While Workday has already developed a significant presence in the cloud when it comes to human resources applications, its push into the financial applications space is more nascent.

Nevertheless, most organizations have yet to shift financial applications into the cloud. In fact, many may never choose to do so at all, depending on the regulatory environment they operate in and to what degree they favor treating IT as a capital or operating expense.

But among the organizations that are moving those applications into the cloud, it’s obvious Workday clearly aims to be at the very least considered right alongside traditional providers of these applications, such as Oracle and SAP.