Appirio Partners with Workday – The Next Step in the Journey to the Cloudsourced Enterprise

It’s with great excitement that we “officially” announce our new partnership with Workday and the formation of a dedicated Workday practice. Appirio’s Workday practice will be led by two members of my management team, Jennifer Taylor who formerly led Appirio HR and Lori Asburry, who previously led our West coast delivery team. Over the last four years, Jennifer and Lori have helped Appirio recruit and build a team of very talented cloud consultants that have successfully completed more than 700 projects that have moved almost 400,000 users to cloud applications and platforms. We’re very excited to now bring our cloud expertise and innovation to the Workday ecosystem, and look forward to the same type of success with Workday customers.

Appirio began with the mission of accelerating enterprise adoption of the cloud (which we called on-demand in 2006), and made the conscious choice to focus on a small set of strategic partners who were leaders in their space and driving the industry. We’ve since centered our efforts around salesforce.com, Google Apps and Amazon Web Services, and are now thrilled to add Workday to that list.

A lot of things have changed since 2006. Salesforce is now a $1B+ company. Google Apps is now being used by 25 million people and has been broadly adopted even by notoriously conservative government agencies. And an increasing number of large enterprises are moving their core applications, and their most sensitive data, to the cloud with Workday. The notion of a cloudsourced enterprise which was fanciful for a company of reasonable size in 2006 is now very much within the realm of possibility.

There’s no question now that enterprises are going to move the core of their business to the cloud. But at the core of any business are people and financials, two areas that have long been the strongholds of companies like SAP and Oracle. Since 2005, Workday has led the charge into the very core of the enterprise. Their success with companies like Flextronics, Commerce Bank and Chiquita proves that customers are not only willing, but keen to finally transition to modern applications for HCM and financial management. We’re excited to join the movement.

Appirio will offer a complete set of solutions to help enterprises make the most of Workday, from migration and integration services that help customers successfully adopt Workday to solutions that bring Workday information together with other cloud applications (more on this soon). In addition, Appirio is now using Workday(for HCM and financials), along with Salesforce and Google to run our own business.

With Salesforce, Google Apps and Workday as a foundation, a completely different type of model for enterprise applications is within reach – agile, user-centric, innovative, and mobile – and we’re excited to help make this vision a reality for our customers!