PaaS Matters: Workday is the Most Recent PaaS Market Entry

Platform as a Service functionality addresses a very specific – and important issue -- with Cloud Computing. SaaS applications, which comprise the majority of talent solutions, are configurable but not customizable. Today’s HCM solutions that provide PaaS functionality allow users and third-party developers to create new or expanded applications and extend their talent or HR suites by using vendor-provided tools and open interfaces. Workday is the most recent provider of PaaS functionality to its customers.

 Software as a Service is a software application licensing and delivery model in which the software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted in the Cloud. The adoption of SaaS moved the day-to-day management of a total application environment – software, OS and hardware upgrades, to the vendor from whom the solution was licensed. Platform access capabilities add a great deal for those who seek it: PaaS is a cloud-delivered infrastructure that typically includes the operating system, programming language execution environment, database, and web services for a developer to create new applications. PaaS also provides use of yet again another “as a Service” – IaaS- Infrastructure as a Service – in which is the hardware, storage, software, and other infrastructure components.

For users, there are marked advantages:

1. No talent or HR application does everything that an individual company wants. Those company-specific needs, which in the past on-premise era, led to one-off customization, can now be addressed via custom extensions to the application using the data models and underlying infrastructure provided by the SaaS application vendor.
2. Beyond extending the capability of an application, sometimes a totally new application is needed. Building on a platform, that application inherits the underlying traits of the talent platform—not just the data models, but the innate security, network capabilities and the like. 
3. In addition, an entirely new product or product suite, unlikely created by a company but of interest to a third-party application developer, can be built on the platform and the infrastructure that supports it. 

Today Workday Co-Founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri announced its intent to open the Workday Cloud Platform to customers and a broader ecosystem of partners, ISVs, and developers. This is good news for customers and partners alike. What can Workday users anticipate as part of this announcement?

In general, there are a series of tools and services that surround a PaaS platform. A user can expect a library of documented APIs (application programming interfaces) that support integration between the code to be developed and the existing applications that the vendor provides. In addition, there is an SDK—a software developer’s kit, that is an app builder that supports development of new applications that will run on the platform.

Over time, user-facing services often ensue, such as an on-line community of app developers who share lessons learned and eventually, may create a marketplace for code they have developed that runs on the platform.

PaaS support has been long-awaited functionality from Workday customers; providing it now will make many clients very happy.