Kieron Allen interviews Matthew Brandt, senior vice president, global partners at Workday, as part of the Acceleration Economy Partners Ecosystem Innovation series, in which he speaks with top executives responsible for the ecosystem businesses of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies.
In this discussion, Brandt details how the ecosystem is evolving, collaboration with cloud hyperscalers, and the importance of trust with AI.
Highlights
Expanding Workday’s Ecosystem through Co-Creation and Co-Selling (00:42)
Both co-creation (or “co-innovation”) and co-selling are huge for Workday as it expands its ecosystem. It’s focused on opening the ecosystem to do more of both. There are three critical pieces of its larger partner strategy: building, growing, and delivering with its partners to provide world-class offerings and experiences for its customers. New and existing partners have access to over 65 million users all on one platform.
Combining Cloud and AI to Serve Customers (03:13)
Workday’s platform combines cloud-native applications and AI is at the core of that business. The two can’t be separated. Partner selection is based on how they can amplify what Workday offers its customers: capabilities, expertise, and intellectual property. The company’s objective is to work with partners that help it build solutions, products, and services that enable its customers to better manage their people and money. Whether they are a cloud partner or an AI partner is less consequential.
Collaboration with Google Cloud and AWS (05:07)
Brandt is excited about the evolution of Workday’s partnership with Google Cloud. He thinks it will help customers elevate the game when it comes to optimizing business performance, generating insights, and expediting transactions. It’s using GenAI models and Vertex AI to enable GenAI capabilities within Workday Extend. Workday offerings are now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
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He’s also super excited about its expanded partnership with AWS. They’re both investing in a joint go-to-market initiative to accelerate cloud transformation and joint innovation. Workday’s using AWS cloud infrastructure and tools to develop Gen AI capabilities.
Building AI Trust (07:08)
Noticing the gap in AI trust, Workday conducted a global study pertaining to this topic earlier this year. The company learned that business leaders agree that AI holds tremendous potential for business transformation but there is a lack of trust that it will be deployed responsibly.
The key to closing the gap, Brandt says, is ensuring companies are transparent and have strong AI governance in place. For instance, Workday launched its AI Marketplace recently, which is intended to help unify trusted AI innovation from Workday and its partners. The marketplace hosts partner solutions that demonstrate adherence to the responsible AI governance framework that the company developed with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Partner Initiative (09:30)
Built on Workday allows its partners to build, distribute, and sell their applications on the Workday platform. This provides its partners with access to more than 65 million users and all of its customers. Partners can then list their applications on the Workday marketplace and leverage Workday’s substantial go-to-market engine. Customers will benefit from Workday’s security model, the reliability of its platform, AI built into the core, the speed of innovation, and partner applications that meet specific needs.
