Workday focused on growing presence with partners in APAC

For Sarang Chipalkatti, Senior Director, APAC Partner Ecosystem, Workday the biggest challenge for Workday now is getting more partners into countries where it wants to scale fast.

As one of the fastest growing AI enterprise platforms in Asia, Workday relies heavily on its partners to enable its customers. While the tech company does have some direct customers, 85% of its projects in the Asia Pacific region are delivered by its partners.

In its latest expansion into Vietnam recently, the enterprise AI platform company partnered with five partners to empower Vietnamese organizations to scale and unlock the full potential of enterprise AI. The inaugural partners driving this expansion include Amaris, Deloitte, FPT Information Systems, Rolling Arrays, and VSOL.

With a partner first strategy in the region, Workday is now focused on ensuring that partners are well enabled to help customers achieve their goals in their investments with Workday.

Speaking to CRN Asia, Sarang Chipalkatti, Senior Director, APAC Partner Ecosystem, Workday shared that partners have been instrumental in scaling the decision-making or the outcomes for customers.

“The way we do that is we have partners who can build on Workday. Basically, a partner can build their own AI solutions and add value on top of the platform that we have. This could be from trying to build a benefit solution for a customer in Korea, for example, or to build integrations with other applications or to localize a few things that are specific to that country or language. The beauty of it is that they can all be put as apps on the Workday marketplace and that allows our customers to go and access the marketplace and get the AI solutions they need to really align to their requirements,” explained Chipalkatti.

The Workplace marketplace currently has about 300 partners globally who have started building and putting their applications there. Workday has about 2400 partners globally with 300 specifically building on the marketplace. In APAC, he said there are about 300 partners and are recruiting at least two partners every week.

“So, there's fast recruitment of partners, onboarding of partners for a basic reason. We are getting into new countries and new territories, and we want to be innovative with the commercial model that we are offering to our partners,” he added.

According to Chipalkatti, for new partners, there is an enablement program which any partner can access after they sign the partnership and there is a clear embark program, which they must go through to understand the processes, the tools and alignment with our Workday pitch going into the market.

“It includes go-to-market and includes information on how to pitch the Workday demo, for example. So, it does give you a complete lifecycle that the customer has, and the Workday certifications are available on education programs which are separate, which has been there for a long time. The programs are very successful and have been gaining maximum traction,” he added.

At the same time, Chipalkatti highlighted that the sales track is gaining more traction in enablement. The sales track is more for partners who are advisory firms or small boutique firms who can bring Workday leads.

“There's a reward program associated with that and then if you look at the innovation track, it allows partners to get their ideas, listen to the customers and build on a Workday platform and then put that in the marketplace. So, I would say these tracks have seen a lot of partners willing to invest in their resources and wanting to go to market together with us,”Chipalkatti said.

So, there have been joint pursuits in the market; we see that. In terms of enablement, if we believe that there is an enablement required in local language, then what we do is take that over within APAC and start building, utilizing our teams which are local here to go and talk to our partners. It's more of one-to-many kind of training sessions than we do.

When asked if Workday would be bringing its MSP offering to the region, Chipalkatti mentioned that the focus now is on enabling value-added resellers as they are a much faster go-to-market, specifically in the APAC region.

Partner expansion

For Chipalkatti, the biggest challenge for Workday now is getting more partners into countries where it wants to scale fast.

“And the idea for us is, how do we make sure that the partners understand what we offer and are able to take that to their customers. We want the decision-making as close to the customer as possible. And hence, having the right partner at the right place with the customer becomes absolutely critical. So, there's a lot of work being done in who the right partners are, how do we get them certified so they are able to deliver the latest technology that is available on Workday, including the AI and Sana interface that we are building right now,” he explained.

As there are around 300 plus partners in the region, Chipalkatti pointed out that each country has a different requirement when t comes to partners. For example, in Southeast Asia, Workday wants more local partners in those countries, rather than having a global partner trying to get into a local space.

This is why the focus on local partner recruitment is key for Workday, with regional ones being a strong focus to be innovative in these markets.

Future plans

As Workday moves into new markets, the tech company wants to venture new customers and opportunities that are beyond HR, finance and IT. Chipalkatti believes that the platform allows them to scale and innovate faster.

“Where I see a huge opportunity is in the markets where we can go with a resale, proposition where the partners can do an end-to-end sales cycle and can own the whole Workday experience that we have today. So next year, our focus is on how we scale to a level where we just provide the right level of opportunity for our partners to independently run a sales cycle. Because that's where the scale will come. And at the same time, the experience for them to innovate using the Workday platform, where they can serve the customers and meet where the customer needs them to meet in terms of faster decision making and business outcomes,” he said.

Acknowledging that may need to be some handholding with these partners, it will only be to bring in the best support that is required, as competitor might not be able to do that and deliver it the way Workday wants to.

“Every country is going to be different. As we start maturing the ecosystem, we will be looking at a faster scale of that. Today, 25% of our business is sourced by partners in APAC. And for next year, I would like to increase that to say 30% or 40%. So, we are happy with what we did. But we want to believe that in APAC, we can do more,” he concluded.