There is an interesting tie-up between cloud pure-plays Salesforce.com and Workday. The duo are extending their existing partnership and plan to build integrations between Saleforce.com’s CRM and Workday’s HCM and financial management applications (and its freshly announced big data analytics offering – see here) to allow joint access by customers.
Uniting the two cloud environments makes sense and the applications complement each other. What does not make sense is that this mirrors an almost identical agreement Salesforce.com made with Oracle in June relating to Fusion financials and HCM in the cloud (see here). And there was no mention of the role of Salesforce.com’s own early stage HCM applications in either announcement. One interpretation is that it is not going well so Salesforce.com is hooking into other players to access these areas of functionality and the coveted back office space which has been resistant to SaaS so far.
Details were scant as this appears to have been a ruse to grab attention on the day Oracle released its Q1 results (hence our decision to post well after the HotView on Oracle) and to do some promotional work for Salesforce.com’s upcoming conference. Nevertheless cloud partnerships will be important in moving the market forward and this one has the potential to pry open the back office.