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TechPointCloud

HR disruptor Workday woos finance teams

By
Heather Clancy
Heather Clancy
By
Heather Clancy
Heather Clancy
September 28, 2015, 11:54 AM ET
Courtesy of Workday, Inc.

Workday is slowly strengthening its influence among finance teams, particularly within organizations that have a high dependence on human “capital.”

The company now claims more than 150 corporate accounts for its financial management applications, including the city and county of Denver, commercial real estate company Cushman & Wakefield, and marketplace upstart Etsy (ETSY). At least 80 of those installations have progressed beyond the prototyping phase into mission-critical applications, compared with 50 early this summer.

The next edition of the cloud software company’s financial application emphasizes deeper analytics, including prebuilt dashboards for creating auditor reports or high-level project updates. Another new feature will help managers keep better tabs on internal procurement needs.

Of particular note, the software company will ship its financial planning module by September 2016. That puts it into more direct competition with long-time partners like Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, and Tidemark.

“We are entering this space in earnest,” said Leighanne Levensaler, senior vice president of products at Workday (WDAY).

The proclamation comes as Workday prepares for its annual customer conference in Las Vegas and echoes a theme sounded often this year by top executives: its software isn’t just for human resources professionals. It is becoming a far broader business planning platform for people-intensive businesses.

Early on, Workday encouraged its customers to turn to partners like Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, and Tidemark for these sorts of analytics. It actually was strategic investor in Tidemark’s most recent $25 million round of funding in June. (Its total is more than $100 million.)

You can expect the smaller companies to pivot accordingly. Tidemark, in particular, is advancing its own agenda aggressively ahead of Workday’s big push into financial planning analytics. Its latest update, including innovative corporate benchmarking capabilities, was released last week. Tidemark Compete combines a company’s existing operational data with information culled from third-party sources. “You can take this data and bring it into the process of budgeting, programming, and analysis,” said Tidemark founder and CEO Christian Gheorghe.

Tidemark has about 75 enterprise accounts, including Netflix (NFLX), BlackBerry (BBRY), and Chiquita.

Adaptive Insights is widely considered the category leader for cloud-based finance software, with approximately 2,700 customers ranging from Coca-Cola (KO) to LinkedIn .

Workday replaces your human resources department:

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About the Author
By Heather Clancy
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