Two things drive competitive advantage in today’s rapidly-changing business environment: the user experience and integrated enterprise systems. Finding applications that can handle business functions is easy – there are thousands of providers, and several will surely meet your needs.

Connecting them has always been difficult. With many disparate platforms, organizations often had to rely on expensive middleware or a large IT staff. Today, Workday® and other cloud providers are creating plug-in connections that make the integrations easier and much less costly.

Integrating enterprise platforms is a critical business competency, but one that many companies struggle to achieve when the options are managing a large number of custom integrations or using very expensive middleware.

The Workday® Approach
Watching the way Workday® has disrupted the enterprise software industry has been a study in service delivery. While the major enterprise software providers were chasing comprehensive functionality and complexity, Workday® brought us a new way of thinking about existing technology and the how it is delivered. The strategy, from our viewpoint, is based on simplicity, ease of use, and a relentless focus on service.

In Workday®, integration is core service, fundamental to the platform design. Workday® builds each of its applications and services on the principle that they must connect to other business systems to be useful to the customers.

Workday® Services
At the core of Workday® services are comprehensive sets of standard APIs grouped by functional areas. These services support all interaction with Workday®, and they inherit the security permissions of the user. The services use open standards (SOAP and REST) compatible with other standards-based platforms and middleware. Workday® provides these services in four ways:
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