With the holiday break behind us, let’s look at what’s new in the Workday Services landscape. While many clients are in phase zero, or a pre-RFP assessment period, of strategically planning what to do with their legacy enterprise human capital management (HCM) and finance applications or contemplating massive HR and finance operations transformation, we highly encourage all large-enterprise (LE) and medium-enterprise (ME) organizations to read our new report, The Workday Services Landscape, Q4 2023.

We thank all the services providers that participated in this research with us in Q3 and Q4 of 2023. This detailed evaluative and primary research takes a deep dive into what has changed in the Workday Services provider landscape in the last two years and the new set of providers to consider. Whether you want to consider a large-sized SI or a boutique firm, we take a look at 27 notable Workday-certified providers that offer Workday services such as strategy/business consulting, implementation, or AMS. While we researched over 39 providers, the report only includes Workday-certified providers that had a minimum of $10 million in Workday practice revenue.

The report looks at where current market maturity lies, key market dynamics, what’s trending, challenges, and disruptors. In addition to the geographic and industry focus for each provider, you will also get an understanding of the current core and extended business scenarios in the Workday market. Workday buyers contemplating RFPs for SI selection need to take a look at this section to understand which SI truly brings in offerings in these extended scenarios, as that sets the SIs apart and may factor into your RFP process.

Some things to consider:

  • Twinning of HCM and Finance: While Workday HCM is well known to be one of the dominant players in the cloud HCM market, the last couple of years has seen a dramatic increase in adoption of Workday Finance and especially Workday full-platform deals. Full platform mainly indicates adopting and implementing Workday HCM, Finance, Adaptive Planning, PRISM Analytics and Reporting, and sometimes more capabilities at the same time — mostly, HCM and Finance are always included in full platform deals. This is definitely factoring into the increase in more organizations moving from old on-premises to a true cloud ERP.
  • Financial services: This industry — namely, banking and insurance — is seeing Workday Finance adoption or full platform adoption at a rapid rate. Needless to say, you need to know the best SIs that can successfully do a full platform execution. For decades, many financial services companies relied on old and clunky legacy ERP and other supporting finance software. Does COBOL ring a bell? While considering a SaaS model for HCM is a much easier sell, cloud ERP or SaaS software for the finance industry is a completely different world. Risk tolerance is very low, and demand for accuracy and performance is very high. For many in this industry, taking that transformative jump to the SaaS model brought in speed and agility never seen before. Only some SIs are the right partners for full-platform Workday deals. There is also heavy Workday activity in medium-sized enterprises in financial services areas such as local banks and credit unions.
  • Healthcare: This is one area where Workday full-platform deals are the most popular, with Workday HCM, Finance, and SCM completely taking over the old PeopleSoft and Lawson market. Workday invested heavily in making a big push in healthcare industry adoption of Workday products, and those results are showing in both large- and medium-sized enterprise healthcare clients.
  • Public sector: Many public sector clients have been on old legacy software for both HCM and finance for 15 years or more on average. Government clients have greatly loosened up their restrictions on SaaS adoption, and with that, it is no surprise that many government clients looking to do the next ERP or HCM upgrade are looking to go full SaaS — and Workday is a perfect poster child for them. It is a popular option with US SLED (state, local, and education) — think state, county, city, districts, and universities. It’s also notable that the government space is also actually seeing a lot of full-platform Workday deals, and SIs are busy in this space, working on bringing in one platform for both HR and ERP transformation. With Workday now FedRAMP-certified, look for further analysis from me this year on notable Workday HCM projects at US federal agencies.

The report goes more in depth on many key factors, shining a light on additional capabilities to look for in SIs such as Extend, Adaptive, etc. If you are considering moving to Workday products and embarking on an implementation project or preparing to set out a Workday implementation RFI or RFP, be it for Workday HCM, Finance, full platform, Adaptive, PRISM, Extend, PSA, Student Management, or more, definitely take the time to read this report: The Workday Services Landscape, Q4 2023.

Additionally, watch out for the new Workday Services Forrester Wave™ evaluation coming in Q2 of 2024 — which looks closely at the top services providers/SIs in this space and delves deeper into which SIs are suitable across several key criteria critical to your evaluation in the RFP process.

If you have any further questions or need additional insights about Workday products and services providers in association with this research, please feel free to book time with me here.