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Workday to Build Industry’s First Student Application Developed in Last 20 Years

Mobile-First Cloud Application to Vault Higher Education Institutions into Modern Day with Greater Focus on Student Engagement, Outcomes, and Big Data Analytics

PLEASANTON, CALIF. — September 10, 2013 —Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for human resources and finance, today announced plans to build Workday Student, the only end-to-end student application built this century for the needs of modern-day higher education institutions. Working with forward-thinking colleges and universities to design the application, including Broward College, Yale University, Tallahassee Community College, and Southern New Hampshire University, Workday will take a new approach to the traditional student system, bringing together a system of record, a mobile-first system of engagement, and a big data analytic foundation, all unified with Workday’s administrative solution and delivered in the cloud.

Today’s higher education institutions face increasing pressures due to political and public dissatisfaction with rising tuition costs, increased student debt, and declining job-placement rates. Funding models for these institutions are shifting from enrollment-based to outcome-based, placing more emphasis on students getting the relevant job skills they need to compete in the global economy. Higher education institutions are tackling these problems with 20-year-old legacy student applications and bolt-on solutions, resulting in complex and disjointed systems that are extremely costly to maintain.

Starting with a clean sheet of paper, Workday plans to leverage modern technology, cloud delivery, in-memory technology, object modeling, and big data analytics, to create a natively built mobile student application that transforms the way colleges manage their students—from prospecting to graduation and beyond. In addition, the application will be designed to provide institutions with the data and insights they need to demonstrate accountability with the ability to scale and easily configure to changing needs.

A Modern System of Record to Support Traditional and Non-Traditional Educational Models
At the heart of Workday Student will be a system of record that assists colleges in the recruiting, admitting, awarding, enrolling, advising, retaining, billing, and placement of students. Workday Student will address the complex and diverse requirements facing today’s institutions by supporting each of the traditional, non-traditional, on-line, and competency-based education models.

With this offering, colleges and universities will be able to create individualized learning and success-guided pathways for students based on their unique education goals, and track progress from start to completion.

A Mobile-First System of Engagement for Students, Faculty and Staff
Embedded in Workday Student will be a mobile-first system of engagement designed to help students make informed decisions at each step on their educational paths and accelerate progress toward their desired outcomes.

Using Workday, students are expected to receive course recommendations based on personal preferences, optimal class schedule options based on their calendar availability, what-if models and virtual advising from faculty and staff, and enrollment updates on friends and cohort groups in the delivery methods they prefer, including mobile phone, tablet, social media, or email. Faculty and staff may create retention strategies and mobile alerts to enable them to directly connect with at-risk students. Applicants, students, faculty, and staff will each have individual portfolios that house their artifacts, including academic and student life transcripts, certifications, course work, competencies, badges, job related experiences, and published research.

A Big Data Analytic Foundation for Data-Driven Decision Making
Supporting Workday Student will be a Big Data Analytic foundation that will empower institutions with instant access to real-time data and analysis, helping to guide decision-making and demonstrate accountability. Institution researchers, executives, front-line managers, and even trustees can receive operational analytics of real-time information presented in personalized dashboards in any browser or mobile device.

Workday Student is also expected to deliver predictive analytics on executive and trustee dashboards, illustrating future enrollment patterns, optimized schedules (for course enrollment and demand planning), peer institution comparisons, at-risk students, financial aid needs, and receivable models. The goal is to better support organizational modeling, resource planning, and recruitment and retention strategies.

Availability
Workday is scheduled to make initial components of Workday Student generally available to Workday customers in the second half of calendar year 2014, as an add-on application, sold separately. Release of the full product is expected to be completed by the end of calendar year 2016.

Comments on the News
“Higher education is an important global industry that is facing some significant challenges right now. Workday has a passion for higher education, and we are continuing to build upon the success of our enterprise applications in this industry to help institutions tackle these issues,” said Dave Duffield, co-founder and co-CEO, Workday. “Workday Student, unified with our entire administrative solution, will empower everyone on a college campus—from administrators to students to faculty to trustees—so all can achieve greater success.”

“We are partnering with Workday on this project because our current system does not come close to helping us serve our students. Many other higher education institutions face similar challenges, and we believe Workday’s vision is going to help solve some big problems in higher education,” said J. David Armstrong, Jr., president, Broward College. “This new application is focused on student success and will be built not only for today’s needs, but also for our constantly changing environments. With Workday Student, we are going to be able to serve students in ways we can only imagine today.”

“We are focused on delivering a world-class education to our exceptional students and want to engage with our students in a modern, state-of-the-art way,” said Ernst Huff, associate vice president for Student and Faculty Administrative Services, Yale University. “As part of the initial group of influencers, we are thrilled to help develop the next-generation student solution for higher education.”

“Current systems are like a filing cabinet where you put data in but can’t easily use it in meaningful ways,” said Bret Ingerman, vice president for Information Technology, Tallahassee Community College. “Workday Student will be entirely different, combining in-memory technology, built-in analytics, a cloud delivery model, and a mobile-first design approach, to allow us to access, manage, and understand data in ways that weren’t previously possible. As an early adopter, we have the unique opportunity to influence the technology that will impact our college directly and ultimately enable our entire organization to serve students, faculty, and staff in new and very powerful ways.”

“Most student information systems were built for the higher education models of 30 years ago and then revised, bolted onto, and stitched together for the ways our industry has evolved,” said Paul LeBlanc, president, Southern New Hampshire University. “We are thrilled to help shape Workday Student. A clean-slate, next-generation technology, and an embrace of the emerging models of delivery for teaching and learning—that’s an innovator’s dream.”

Images

/ Workday Student will be a mobile-first system of engagement designed to anticipate what each student needs and to provide personalized communications to help them succeed.
/ Workday Student is expected to provide on-the-go recruiters with helpful data about the high schools they visit, enabling them to make the most informed decisions about their institution’s student body.

About Workday
Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for human resources and finance. Founded in 2005, Workday delivers human capital management, financial management, and analytics applications designed for the world’s largest organizations. Hundreds of companies, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises, have selected Workday.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, our expectations for future applications and performance. The words “believe,” “may,” “will,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “expect,” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Risks include, but are not limited to those described our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. Workday assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

Any unreleased services, features, or functions referenced in this document, our website or other press releases or public statements that are not currently available are subject to change at Workday's discretion and may not be delivered as planned or at all. Customers who purchase Workday, Inc. services should make their purchase decisions based upon services, features and functions that are currently available.

© 2013. Workday, Inc. All rights reserved. Workday and the Workday logo are registered trademarks of Workday, Inc. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

From 1 15 September 2013

Why Workday Is Different by Design, and Why It Matters

August 7, 2012 by Stan Swete on Cloud

At Workday, a large part of my time is spent explaining how we are different by design. There is a long list of points we make to describe our different approach, but at the core the main difference between Workday's cloud applications and traditional enterprise applications is how we've made the object model the core of our architecture.

We use the object model to define both the structure of our applications (classes, relationships, and attributes) as well as the logic of our applications (methods). All parts of the object model are defined as metadata. Instead of the thousands of relational tables and millions of lines of code used to define traditional enterprise software, Workday applications consist of millions of metadata definitions. Workday uses a relational database to store all metadata and all application data. To optimize application performance, Workday keeps all application metadata and most application data in memory.

Having the application structure defined as metadata means the structure of Workday applications can be changed without having to restructure the database. Having application logic defined as metadata means that logic can be changed without coding or recompiling code. Not using the database to represent the structure of our applications dramatically reduces the number of tables needed to support them.

While the "how" part of the story is interesting, I'd like to focus more on the "why" questions behind our architecture. Why take a different approach, and why does it matter? The answer involves four critical areas for both Workday and our customers: speed, security, insight, and change.

Speed
When you think of what's traditionally known as enterprise resource-planning systems (ERP), speed is probably not the first thought that comes to mind. But when you're a startup that has decided to compete against large ERP software vendors, you do think about the need to move quickly. We launched Workday in 2005 using the object model, allowing us to significantly speed application development. To this day, developers can rapidly change Workday applications without having to worry about altering the underlying database, or performing any database administration operations as they build new features and products.

This is how we are able to provide customers with three Workday updates per year instead of the industry standard of 1½ years or longer for traditional software upgrades. We can quickly respond to new customer requirements, and the shorter development cycle lets customers more easily engage as design partners. (Waiting 1½ years or more to see your idea make it into production can put off even the most enthusiastic customer, and with Workday the payoff can happen within four months.)

Security
Workday's architectural approach means that our developers and our customers—including anyone working for them—can't access the database where customer data is stored. All customer data is encrypted and is accessed only by the application server.

This is a huge improvement to overall security in the enterprise space. Limiting the point of access to data to only the application server is not true of any on-premise ERP implementation, and likely not true for hosted enterprise application implementations, even if the vendors offering those implementations call them "SaaS."

Insight
Since Workday defines data relationships as relationships among objects, as opposed to the traditional way of culling data from across thousands of tables, we are able to provide reporting and analysis over transactional data that other enterprise applications cannot provide.

When running an analytics report, our system uses relationships to the primary object in the report (such as "worker") to gather all data related to that object. The equivalent for a traditional ERP system would be to join all data across all tables relating to "worker" and send the results to the application server's memory. Workday doesn't have to do the joins and the data is already in memory. This allows Workday to quickly present the requested report and for customers to rapidly drill down on select dimensions of it.

For example, a Workday customer could run a report that shows not only information about all of its workers in R&D, but also how many of its senior developers work in San Francisco. This type of analysis can only happen in traditional applications when the data has been "pre-joined" and loaded into a separate reporting system. While that's a common approach for business intelligence, it adds cost and complexity to reporting. Security has to be implemented for the separate system, and data loaded into it may be out of date by the time it's viewed. Since our reports run on the same object structure where transactions are executed, we avoid the issues of separate reporting systems.

Change
Maybe the most important driver for our different approach is the ability to build applications that are open to change. Even after 30 years, the requirements for enterprise software continue to rapidly change. Vendors must still deliver against longstanding requirements such as reliable transaction processing, scalable batch processing, and high volume data import, but we are increasingly challenged to address new requirements such as built-in analysis, configurable and collaborative workflow, and mobile access.

At Workday, we've proved our ability to satisfy the old requirements and to handle the new ones. In just two years, our iPhone application has received five new feature updates and a complete UI refresh. This level of change is unheard of in enterprise software but it is the standard for consumer technology, which is where most of the innovation is coming from.

Complex relational database architectures are not nimble enough to respond to the new requirements for enterprise applications. The path to new capabilities for applications written on these architectures is one of expensive integration and rewrites as opposed to smooth evolution.

The pace of change in our industry makes the discussion about application architecture more important than ever. That makes it all the more satisfying to explain how Workday is different.

--Stan

About Workday

Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for human resources and finance. Founded in 2005, Workday delivers human capital management, financial management, and analytics applications designed for the world’s largest organizations. Hundreds of companies, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises, have selected Workday.

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From blogs.workday.com/Blog/why_workday_is_different_by_design.html15 September 2013