Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about Workday drawn from our latest market research, Ventana Research Buyers Guide: Workforce Management, which assesses how well providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.  

We recently published two Ventana Research Workforce Management Buyers Guides, an assessment of technology providers and products that provide individual and combined human capital management and workforce management platform support. At Ventana Research, we continue to believe that, for most use-cases, there is a clear choice for workforce management platforms for any use in your enterprise. We developed two technology assessments and buyers guides to focus on Basics and Suite platforms. 

In all of our Buyers Guides, we utilize a structured research methodology called the Value Index that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and provider selection process for workforce management basics and suites. We evaluated Workday in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the provider (TCO/ROI and provider validation).  

In the Workforce Management Basics Buyers Guide, our analysis classified Workday as an Innovative provider, receiving an overall grade of A- with an 84.7% performance. Workday’s best grouped results came in Product Experience at 86.6% performance and an A- grade due in part to its A in Manageability. In Customer Experience, Workday received a B+ grade with a 74.0% performance due to its 77.0% performance in Validation. Workday was designated a Leader in Manageability and Usability. 

Workday’s A- grade in Product Experience was impacted by its B in Adaptability, where it could streamline or improve the ease of use of capabilities alongside increasing the preconfigured options. Customer Experience was impacted by its B+ grade in TCO/ROI, where it could provide in-depth description and documentation for identifying and quantifying achievable cost savings. 

Workday performed best in Product Experience with an A- grade, notably receiving an A in Reliability due to its underlying architecture of the software supporting delivery of required capabilities and functionalities. Within technology architecture and operation, Workday provides flexibility with deployment options that meet the needs of buyers. In Manageability, Workday received an A due to its completeness of application-level security by activity, task and process and data-level security by user, role, application, activity, task or process. Workday performed well in Customer Experience with a B+, supported by a B++ in Validation due to its product roadmap that addresses target customer requirements. 

Our analysis classified Workday as a provider of Merit, receiving an overall grade of A- with an 84.1% performance. Workday’s best grouped results came in Product Experience at 85.6% performance and an A- grade due in part to its A in Reliability. In Customer Experience, Workday received a B+ grade with a 74.0% performance due to its 77.0% performance in Validation. Workday was designated a Leader in Manageability and Usability. 

Workday’s A- grade in Product Experience was impacted by its B in Adaptability, where it could enhance its options and appropriate allocation of investments to meet future adaptability requirements. Customer Experience was impacted by its B+ grade in TCO/ROI, where it could widen its breadth of description/documentation for identifying and quantifying achievable cost savings. 

Workday performed best in Product Experience with an A- grade, notably receiving an A in Reliability due to its underlying architecture of the software supporting delivery of required capabilities and functionalities. Within technology architecture and operation, Workday provides flexibility with deployment options that meet the needs of buyers. Workday performed well in Customer Experience with a B+ grade, supported by a B++ in Validation due to its product roadmap that addresses target customer requirements.  

This assessment was based on Workforce Management, v.2023R2, released August 2023.  

This research-based guide is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of workforce management software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Buyers Guide by clicking here and included software providers that wish to learn more can click here. Click below to read the individual executive summaries: 

Workforce Management Basics 

Workforce Management Suites