AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Workday and AWS Deliver Enhanced AI Capabilities
By Shitij Agarwal, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Poornima Chand, Principal Solutions Architect – AWS
By Justin Head, Principal Software Engineer – Workday
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| Workday |
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In today’s highly competitive market, being innovative is essential for competitive advantage. That’s precisely what the integration of Workday Extend and Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers—it provides organizations with the power to unlock innovation and create custom solutions. The strategic collaboration between AWS and Workday leverages the vast technological tools and offerings of AWS to amplify the robustness of the Workday solutions that help organizations manage their people and money. Furthermore, this integration opens up new opportunities for organizations to boost productivity, enhance security, and increase scalability. Let’s take a deeper look into the power of this better-together story.
The Art of the Possible: Workday Extend and AWS Integration
Workday Extend is a no/low-code developer platform that helps businesses build customized capabilities, apps, and solutions on top of the Workday platform and solutions. AWS is a comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Integrating Workday Extend and AWS allows customers to combine the ease-of-use of Workday Extend, along with their finance and people data in Workday, with AWS’ broad set of cloud services.
The Workday Extend AWS integration natively embeds AWS services into the set of tools that developers use to build Workday Extend apps. This provides an improved experience for developers by allowing them to build on the familiar Workday Extend platform, using AWS services they are proficient in. With several AWS’ AI services and custom business logic processing now available in Workday Extend, customers focus on innovation and faster time-to-market, rather than building and managing integrations from the ground up. With this integration, customers can leverage their existing investments, and combine their data in Workday and AWS, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
This integration opens up endless possibilities for a variety of new use cases such as:
- A billing engine to do complex calculations and to automate billing processes.
- Perform image recognition to detect and extract faces from an employee’s photo to generate a physical badge on-demand.
- Extract and understand valuable insights from text within documents such as candidate resumes or government-issued IDs to automate data entry and downstream processes.
- Detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII) to meet compliance requirements.
- Detect sentiment from an employee’s feedback to have more meaningful and relevant conversations around the employee experience.
- Enable multilingual user experiences for Workday Extend applications for global organizations using language translations.
AWS and Workday Extend capabilities
For certain customers, Workday Extend’s workflow tool now includes dedicated drag-and-drop AWS components that integrate with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Lambda, and Amazon EventBridge to help customers build sophisticated solutions with Workday Extend and AWS as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: AWS integrations natively supported in Workday Extend Orchestration Builder
These components unlock new possibilities for Workday Extend apps with Amazon S3 enabling storage and data processing, AWS Lambda opening the door to custom business logic and processes leveraging third-party libraries, and Amazon EventBridge facilitating event-driven applications and two-way interactions between Workday Extend and AWS.
Customers also get access to several AI capabilities to gain deeper insight within text, images, and videos to help build customized apps that support their unique and evolving business needs. The AWS AI services available from Workday Extend include Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Textract. These AI services allow customers to easily add intelligence to their Extend applications without the need to train custom machine-learning models.
And last but certainly not least, security is critical to the integration between Workday and AWS. Each Workday Extend account is mapped to a dedicated and isolated AWS account managed by Workday. Each account is pre-configured with security control mechanisms to mitigate risk and avoid common mistakes. Authentication between Workday and AWS is seamlessly handled so customers don’t need to juggle credentials to get their application working, and authorized developers that they choose from their Workday Extend account gain access to AWS.
Pioneering the Future
The collaboration between Workday and AWS is more than just an integration; it’s a revolution in how organizations approach digital transformation. By supercharging Workday Extend apps with AWS AI, organizations can reduce time-to-market for business critical applications. This collaboration not only redefines the landscape of business processes but also opens the door to accelerated innovation and growth.
To harness the full potential of this integration, please refer to Workday Developer Site or speak with your Workday Account Executive. The future awaits, and it’s brighter than ever with Workday Extend and AWS.
Workday – AWS Partner Spotlight
Workday is an AWS Advanced Technology and AWS Competency Partner. Unlike ERP systems with disparate applications, Workday brings best-in-class finance and HR applications into one powerful system. And with an intelligent data core that seamlessly connects your financial and people data, you have the insights and agility to make the right moves, and make them with confidence.