We recently completed the latest edition of the Workday services evaluative research under The Forrester Wave™: Workday Services, Q2 2024. The last edition of this Wave was published in 2021, and a lot has changed in the last three years. In general, outside of Workday HCM, we are seeing a massive adoption of Workday Finance, Adaptive Planning, Prism Analytics, Professional Services Automation, and full-platform deployments across several industries ranging from healthcare, financial services, retail, hospitality, and entertainment to regulated industries and the US public sector. This has resulted in a diverse set of services providers addressing the heavy demand in the Workday customer base. Some of the large providers excel, with a comprehensive set of accelerators, proprietary assets, and robust delivery methodology on top of the Workday-prescribed methodology and extensive industry experience, while others have truly innovated with unique industry and functional solutions using Workday Extend.
Apart from large providers, we wanted to represent the phenomenal work done by several boutique firms in human capital management (HCM), finance, and full platform deployments along with Workday Extend, Workday cloud platform, and general tooling. These boutique firms are crucial in servicing a large midmarket customer segment where Workday is heavily adopted. While you may find a boutique firm with a truly compelling offering featured higher up in Wave positioning, other boutiques may be positioned lower in the Wave because they are relatively compared to very large providers. These are not to be mistaken as weaker offerings, however, as they still are at the top of the stack of the larger Workday services ecosystem featured in The Workday Services Landscape, Q4 2023. If you are a midmarket customer looking for robust Workday implementation capabilities and the right price points, these boutique firms are worth considering in your Workday Services RFP.
As Workday is looking to gain a bigger market share in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and finance, planning, and industry operations compared to its top competitors, Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and SAP S/4HANA, Workday has invested heavily in its tightly controlled services provider ecosystem to ensure superior quality of services offered and that the products are installed correctly. This has allowed for the services firm, with extensive background in certain industries, being better suited and positioned to cater to certain customers. Workday has added a lot of new services providers in its ecosystem since 2021, and as we begin to see them open up their ecosystem, you will find innovative work from services providers in 2024 specifically in the Workday AI Marketplace.
We encourage new and existing Workday customers to use the curated list from The Forrester Wave™: Workday Services, Q2 2024, as a starting point to get up to speed with current market dynamics and how each services firm scores against an extensive list of product offerings and capabilities, as well as Workday market strategy. Pair it with The Workday Services Landscape, Q4 2023, in order to do a full assessment. If you would like to talk further about the changing market dynamics, key players, and how to work with them, please set up an inquiry or guidance session with me here. Comprehensive 2- or 4-hour advisory service for an in-depth analysis and comparison of the Workday services market is also available.
