Microsoft and Workday announce global strategic partnership

CHICAGO – WORKDAY RISING – September 27, 2016 – Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Workday (NYSE: WDAY) today announced a global, strategic partnership that will expand the business solutions joint customers can use to continually optimize the way work gets done. Through this partnership, the companies unveiled plans to deliver integrations that mirror where and how people want to work across Microsoft Office 365 and Workday’s finance and HR applications, which will enable customers to simplify day-to-day tasks, foster collaboration, and increase productivity.

The announcement was made by Workday Co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri at Workday Rising, complemented by a video appearance by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

“Connecting the productivity tools in Office 365 with Workday’s finance and HR applications will enable customers globally to uncover new ways to produce great work that ultimately drives their businesses forward,” said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO, Workday. “Our partnership with Microsoft is yet another example of our commitment to empowering customers to increase productivity and drive performance with Workday – all in an intuitive experience that mirrors how they prefer to work.”

“Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet, and key to this is forging strategic partnerships with companies including Workday,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Blending the power of Workday’s cloud-based finance and HR applications with the cloud productivity of Office 365 will enable our customers to simplify their businesses processes, enhance collaboration, and infuse more intelligence into their organizations.”

New Integrations Empower Workday Customers to Increase Productivity and Drive Performance

Solutions from Microsoft and Workday are designed to work the way people want to work. Because of that, customers already spend a significant part of their day working between Microsoft Office 365 and Workday applications. These new integrations will further streamline this work experience, enabling joint customers to:

• Simplify collaboration and better adapt to continuous organizational changes: Connecting Office 365 Groups with Workday will enable joint customers to simplify collaboration and transform how work gets done across organizations, teams, and projects. Leveraging the Microsoft Graph API, this integration enables organizational changes within Workday to be automatically reflected in Office 365 Groups. For example, should an employee move to another team, the Office 365 Groups they belong to will automatically reflect this change across email, calendars, and shared documents, ensuring the right people are involved in collaboration at all times. This will ultimately facilitate and encourage even more productive working relationships, and improve the effectiveness of teams and reorganization efforts.
• Simplify day-to-day tasks to increase productivity: Enabled by Microsoft Flow and Workday’s dynamic business process framework, joint customers will be able to eliminate mundane tasks and manual processes by automating workflow across any third-party applications in the Microsoft Flow ecosystem and Workday. For example, a manager can set up an automated workflow for a new employee in Workday, which adds the new hire to specific groups on third-party messaging and chat services. From there, an automated welcome message will introduce the new hire to the group.
• Maximize time and resources: Connecting Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) with the Microsoft Graph will provide people and teams with rich, actionable insights into the company’s communication and collaboration trends. Using Microsoft MyAnalytics (formerly Delve Analytics), employees will be able to better understand how, when, and with whom they are spending their time as well as ways to make the most of it. For example, employees could determine the average time spent in meetings, response times to their emails, their most frequent collaboration partners or how many emails they have exchanged with their managers and peers.

Delivery of the Office 365 and Workday integrations will begin in the second quarter of 2017. The two companies plan to continually work together to deliver additional, deeper connections between their solutions in order to help companies around the world transform their businesses.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @Microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

About Workday

Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. Founded in 2005, Workday delivers financial management, human capital management, and analytics applications designed for the world’s largest companies, educational institutions, and government agencies. More than 1,000 organizations, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises, have selected Workday.

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