Application integration is a key requirement of today's enterprises, one that is typically left to the enterprise to pay for, implement and maintain. Workday takes a different approach to integration by offering hosted, packaged integration built on natively generated web services and delivered using embedded enterprise service bus (ESB) technology.

Interoperable Enterprise Applications

Integration was an afterthought in the design of traditional applications. For years, business and IT professionals have faced a difficult reality: every on-premise business software implementation comes saddled with complex, highly customized integrations that have huge costs and require huge programming efforts. Customers are often left with a patchwork of application programming interfaces and custom code to knit together products into a solution. Legacy integration and big, complex middleware is broken.

Workday's applications are designed to flexibly generate either fine- or coarse-grained web services that support interoperability with other applications. Workday also embeds an enterprise service bus (ESB) in its data centers to help transform and deliver our natively generated web services, allowing Workday's web services to be more easily consumed by external applications.

Workday's approach: Integration On Demand

We started Workday with integration as a core design criteria, along with the philosophy that more and more connectivity to other applications and information resources should be simpler than it is today. Integration should be handled by the provider (Workday) as a service. And because Workday delivers our solutions on-demand, we can offer standards-based, packaged and customizable integrations delivered as a service. Integration On-Demand, an idea the industry has been imagining for years; an idea Workday is delivering.

Workday provides multiple approaches to integration and can support connections to both on-premise and on-demand solutions, depending on the needs of the business:

Workday Integration Network. Workday offers a growing number of common integrations to complementary solutions such as payroll, recruiting, and time and attendance. These connections are created, executed and maintained by Workday as a service, and we will continue to add to this portfolio.

Integration Tools. Workday offers a set of tools that extend Workday access to other systems, supporting the full range of business users, from developer to individual end-user. These tools are provided based on the needs of each customer:

• Reports as a Service. Reports built with Workday's report writer can be made available either as REST-style web services or RSS feeds
• Enterprise Interface Builder. This point-and-click tool allows definition of end-to-end integration (e.g. transform a Workday report into a CSV file and send it via FTP to a designated server) and execution of this integration using Workday's hosted ESB technology.
• Implementation toolkit. This point-and-click tool is used to map and import bulk data from either Excel spreadsheets or ETL tools.
• Integration appliance. For customers who have either not selected integration middleware or want to use Workday's ESB technology on premise, the same ESB technology hosted in Workday's data centers can be installed as a software appliance behind the customer's firewall.

Developer Network. Workday maintains a web site (developer.workday.com) to support the needs of the developers building integrations. The Network provides a variety of resources, including:

• A directory of web services API's including schema definition (XSD) and WSDL for each service.
• Tutorials and examples of implementations of the API's in different interface toolkits.
• A developer forum facilitating discussion of the best use of Workday's API's and integration tools.

Deepening our commitment to Integration On-Demand, Workday recently acquired Cape Clear. Bringing the two organizations together will enable Workday to accelerate its plans in this key area. For more details, check out the news announcement and hear from the two companies why this combination makes so much sense for customers.

Explore Workday Technical Foundation

Business Process Framework | User Experience | Integration On-Demand | Security | Development Framework