Workday buys big data analytics startup Platfora

Workday to offer a wider range of big data services to customers

Workday, the cloud services company founded by Dave Duffield, is to acquire big data analytics startup Platfora. The aim is to expand Workday's services in data analysis - covering not just its core offerings in human resources, but across the range of corporate data.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Workday said in a statement that the move will make the company well placed to meet the needs of customers by enhancing the capabilities of its core products.

"The acquisition will enable Workday to continually enhance our analytics capabilities, especially in areas like managerial reporting and operational analytics where insights are gathered by collecting and connecting multiple data sources (Workday and non-Workday data) to make business decisions," the firm said.

"Customers want to drill down to transaction-level data and analyse it across multiple dimensions for calculating profitability, RoI and other operational metrics."

Workday cited examples such as a retail company wanting to analyse the profitability of specific items using point-of-sale data, or insurance carriers measuring profits against policy values and claims.

The examples underline Workday's move to encompass other areas of business strategy, not just HR, on which it was founded, as it sees value in being able to offer customers better analytics capabilities.

"We want to help our customers unlock even more insights across various forms of financial, people and operational data while cutting the total cost of ownership for managing business intelligence or data warehouses outside Workday," the firm added.

"Our customers have made it clear that they want to bring more data into Workday. The combination of Platfora with Workday gives us the ability to provide a more complete picture than ever before, treating all forms of data equally and allowing endless exploration of insights."

The deal is the second notable cloud purchase in the past 24 hours, after Salesforce signed a deal for data centre optimisation and analytics provider Coolan to help manage the firm's growing cloud platform.