Workday plans analytics push as PRISM fails to stop cloud use

The chief technology officer (CTO) of HR cloud provider Workday has said many IT chiefs appear unconcerned by government snooping and still see the cloud as vital to their enterprise software needs.
Speaking to V3, Annrai O’Toole said that while the PRISM revelations have certainly put data security and privacy back in the spotlight, it has not changed the market for most IT chiefs – a sentiment echoed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff earlier this week.

“I don’t get the sense that CIOs are concerned about governments snooping on their data,” he said. “I think people are more concerned with making sure that they do things to make it very difficult for people, whoever they are, to look at their data.”

On this point, O’Toole said the global nature of data security and protection means many firms still see a dedicated cloud provider as a better means of keeping data secure.

“It doesn’t change what you need to worry about. If you have all your information on premise but it can be accessed across the world, then you’re into all sorts of data-protection regulations and making sure you apply the right policies,” he said.

“I think more and more people are realising they have these issues and vendors like Workday can do a good job as we put a lot of investment into being up to date with these regulations.”

As part of the ongoing push around its products and providing benefits to customers, the IT chief said pushing more analytical capabilities into Workday is high on the agenda for the next year.

"I think a big part of the whole cloud story is analytics. For me cloud itself isn’t so important, it’s the outcomes that it engenders. These are driven by analytics, which is allied to cloud computing, but it’s much bigger,’ he said.

The future for Workday, having beefed up its own offering in 2013, is to improve this to focus on integration with other data sets, O'Toole explained.

“We think we offer great analytics on Workday data, but we want to extend that so we can [bring] in more non-Workday data from other enterprise systems and social media," he said.

“The ability to more easily combine financial data with HR data in a single system and to understand the financial implications of people’s behaviour’s is very complicated to do today.”

O'Toole did not provide any firm timelines for future updates of this nature, but said plans were on the roadmap for 2014 around its product portfolio.

The demand for better data insights and analytics is affecting many industries at present, with F1 teams just some of those looking to use big data to help beat the competition.