Workday Join Hands with Google Cloud

Nasdaq witnessed action around tech companies. Workday stocks were up around 2.5% after announcement of tie-up with Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) that will allow its clients to run its applications on Google Cloud.

A US Based emerging technology company, Workday, which is giving strong competition to many tech giants like Salesforce, SAP and Oracle, announced its multi-cloud strategy, unveiling a multi-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to host its core applications. The cloud HCM and finance vendor had previously only offered AWS as its public cloud host for these apps. The move is the latest by several leading enterprise application vendors, including SAP and Salesforce, to loosen their dependence on AWS — and a significant boost for Google Cloud's data-centric strategy to gain ground in the enterprise.

Under the multi-year strategic partnership, Google Cloud will help businesses run Workday enterprise applications for finance, HR, and planning in a public cloud environment, with ease-of-management, and low network latency.

Workday, with more than 50 million users and more than 8,000 customers globally, supports finance and people operations for some of the world's largest organizations. Many of them have varied requirements regarding where their data can be stored, accessed, and managed.

Google Cloud & Workday Partnership

Google Cloud and Workday plan to build strategic, joint, go-to-market programs that include joint marketing activities and establishing co-selling programs to increase awareness among customers and prospects across the U.S.

Additionally, the two companies will explore opportunities for co-innovation to offer products and services to businesses in industries such as retail, healthcare, and financial services.

Market Outline:

While AWS remains the dominant leading hyperscaler public cloud provider, both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud continue to build market share, while China-based hyperscaler Alibaba is gaining ground internationally. But with the entire market still expanding fast, AWS can hardly be said to be losing out. It's more a case of enterprises looking for more choice, with each provider fine-tuning their pitch to respond to that demand.

Workday's Multi-Cloud Strategy

Although Workday standardized on AWS as its primary public cloud provider under its 2016 deal — and "Amazon continues to be a great partner and customer," a Workday spokesperson told us yesterday — it has always positioned its stance as multi-cloud, and has previously signaled its intention to move to a position where customers could choose which hyperscaler their Workday instance runs on. The underlying technology based on Docker containers and Kubernetes is designed as a standard environment that can be deployed either to Workday's own data centers or any suitable public cloud. An important factor is being able to tap the specific strengths of each of the main providers, particularly in AI and machine learning capabilities. As Sayan Chakraborty, EVP of Technology at Workday, told analysts earlier this year: