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 integrations built on natively generated web services and delivered using an 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 software, 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 technical developers to individual functional end-users.

• Workday Web Services. Workday offers programmatic access to our On-Demand Business Management Services through an robust, industry-standard SOAP API as well as resource-oriented REST-based approach.

Visit our Workday Developer Network for more information about our on-demand approach to integration.

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