Workday, Microsoft forge partnership revolving around Adaptive Planning, Teams, Azure integration | ZDNet

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Microsoft will adopt Workday Adaptive Planning, which will run on Azure. Separately, Workday reported better-than-expected first quarter results and outlined plans to integrate with Salesforce's Work.com.

Microsoft and Workday have forged a broad partnership that combines Workday Adaptive Planning and Microsoft Azure as well as Workday integrations with Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Teams. 

Key points on the partnership include:

Tom Bogan, Workday vice chairman, said the company has had a close working relationship with Microsoft for years as Adaptive Planning has been landing more large enterprise customers.

"Midsized is still are largest customer subset, but large enterprise is the fastest growing and they are approaching parity," said Bogan.

Indeed, the Microsoft partnership represents a large customer win for Adaptive Planning as well as a way to attract other enterprises.

Bogan added that Adaptive Planning has run on Amazon Web Services and with Azure it has two of the big three cloud players.

For joint customers, Microsoft and Workday said they will integrate Microsoft Teams with Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management. The integration will make it easier to submit expenses, provide feedback and handle other functions. 

Workday for Microsoft Teams is available to Workday HCM and Financial Management customers today. Integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Workday Adaptive Planning on Azure will be available next year.

Workday also said it will integrate its applications more with Salesforce to enable joint customers to manage return-to-work plans. Workday will integrate with Salesforce's Work.com, a suite to manage employee safety analytics to reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Workday and Salesforce Work.com integrations will be available to joint customers in June with more modules on deck.

Separately, Workday reported better-than-expected first quarter results.

The company reported a first quarter net loss of 68 cents a share, or 44 cents non-GAAP, on revenue of $1.02 billion. Subscription revenue was up 25.8% from a year ago.

Wall Street was expecting Workday to report a first quarter non-GAAP loss of 48 cents a share on revenue of $1 billion.

Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO of Workday, said the company rolled out more than 400 new features to its software and proved to be mission critical as customers went remote during the COVID-19 pandemic. Workday also saw 90 virtual go-lives in the quarter. Workday Extend, its cloud platform, also became generally available.

The company lowered its fiscal 2021 subscription revenue guidance to $3.67 billion to $3.69 billion due to the COVID-19 economic uncertainty.

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