Workday moving towards being a partner-first organisation

Workday is on a path to become a partner-first organisation, with the next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform player growing its channel over the past two and a half years and continuing to invest in its ecosystem.

Directing the increased integration with partners and the move to increase the volume of business transacted through the channel is Matthew Brandt, senior vice-president of global partners at Workday. He has been with Workday for 15 years and has worked across the business, but started to talk of the possibilities of doing more with the channel when he worked on the sales side of the business.

“There were changes we needed to make as a company to continue to grow and innovate quickly, and I had probably complained the loudest about our ecosystem over the years,” he said.

Brandt stated that the firm had a small partner ecosystem, which comprised of around 40 services and implementation partners globally, including some household names and the four largest GSIs, but there was clearly room for expansion.

“Our peer organisations typically have 1,000 to 1,500 services partners in their ecosystems across the boutiques, and the regional and global SIs. We had about 140 software partners and technology partners,” he said.

Where the supplier did work with partners, it was largely on a tactical basis, emphasising how Workday worked with other elements that the channel was already selling, such as Salesforce or ServiceNow, to encourage a wider solution pitch to a CIO.

“When we were selling our software, we could say, ‘We work well for large enterprises in the landscape that you have’, and that’s an imperative for any CIO to have technology that will integrate. That was the extent of our partner ecosystem. We tinkered around with a few things in the fringes, but nothing really at scale,” he said.

Brandt said that the history of its channel involvement had been small because it wanted to operate a controlled number of partners, but now the firm recognises that growth would come from changing that strategy.

“The analogy that I like to use is we built this beautiful HR and finance garden with very high walls around it designed to keep everybody out. We would have lots of partners say, ‘We want to partner with you, to help you sell your product, to service your product, to integrate more, to build capabilities on Workday’. And our answer was always no – because we were growing so quickly, we didn’t really have a need for more partners. We had a need for extraordinarily high service, so that’s how we got to where we were,” he said.

The appointment of Carl Eschenbach as CEO almost two years ago accelerated the partner mindset, with a leadership team aware of the potential that working with the channel could have on the business.

“The idea for us was, ‘How do we build an ecosystem that supports our strategy? How do we build a larger ecosystem?’. That was a necessity. If you want to have an ecosystem growth-led business, you have to have an ecosystem by definition. How do we create a larger, more mature set of offerings, so that partners are compelled to invest in a Workday business, so that they can grow their business and that we can grow ours?” he added.

Compared with where he started, Brandt has driven growth, with the latest numbers around the ecosystem showing how far the business has come in a relatively short space of time.

“We have been on this transformation over the past few years. The ecosystem was roughly 200 partners two and a half years ago, but our ecosystem today is 1,200 partners. So, a five-times size of the ecosystem in a relatively short period of time,” he said. “It takes time to find, recruit, onboard and enable to make partners successful, and that’s been a big lift for us. We have expanded and created lots of new sets of programmes that give partners ways to enter the front door with Workday.

“We’ve crafted a new services partner programme on a global basis. We’re trying to reduce the cost for partners to build a Workday practice so they can have their people more productive faster. They can help us sell our software and their services or software, and they can have a higher margin, more profitable business, and focus on the services partner programme, which has gone from around 40 to now almost 400.

“The next task for us was to re-look at the way we thought about the ISV community. We had a lot of goals there, one of which was to make it substantially larger, so that community has gone from about 140 or 150 to now probably 500 or 600 of those partners. It’s growing rapidly,” he added.

Workday has seen the volume of business generated by the channel increase, but there is a hunger to go further and keep that momentum going into 2026. One of Brandt’s moves it to offer value-added resellers (VARs) an opportunity to work with the vendor and to provide support for VAR partners so they can widen the market opportunity for the vendor.

“We have started a pure value-added reseller business,” he said, adding that the firm was also looking at expanding its distribution numbers, particularly in South East Asia, to support that push.

The work continues, but Brandt has already made an impact and has seen the number of partners grow, the business increase and the opportunities for further expansion emerge.

“If you ask just about anyone, the narrative within Workday is there is not a conversation that happens without partners. We’ve tried to change the culture of the field organisation so that partners are part of the way we go to market. Our CEO always says our partners aren’t an extension of our sales team, they’re part of our team,” he said.

“We have different programmes to go to market through partners, we are building things with partners in ways that would have been impossible in my first 12 years here. I would say it’s been viewed wildly successfully here internally, in my humble opinion,” he added. “We are a partner-centric organisation. We’re trying to become a partner-first organisation, but it takes time to build trust and relationships.”