Since "Oracle made an offer to PeopleSoft that it couldn't refuse", we all were busy thinking that HRMS market would be captured by Oracle (which it did in the very start).  But as the time passed, we came to know why David Duffield (founder and former CEO PeopleSoft) would have left it for Oracle.

Times are changing and in this era where organizations want to minimize their spending  on administration cost of an application but at the same time want minimum downtime for scheduled maintenance (infrastructures are not assets anymore, they turn to liability with higher maintenance costs), and right there Workday was introduced for such customers.  But with each year its market capture has gone up (especially when it comes to HRMS). 

We can conclude that Workday had more futuristic thinking than Oracle from the fact that OBIEE cloud version was introduced 3 years back where as Workday (which is cloud based tool) was introduced in 2005 itself.

Leaving LMS and CRM apart, Workday is giving tough completion to PeopleSoft

And Customers who have switched from PeopleSoft's HRMS to Workday are not comfortable switching from OBIEE to Workday reporting when it comes to their reporting needs and right there IT Services organizations get a key skillset and offering to work on i.e. Integration of OBIEE with Workday that would replace previously implemented Integration of OBIEE with PeopleSoft

Challenges

Unlike PeopleSoft, Workday is a file based system.  While everything in PeopleSoft works on the concept of Effective date of a transaction, in Workday a new driver comes in i.e. Completion date of an event.  As we don't have any out-of-the-box file system adaptor provided in OBIEE-BIApps HR solution that can directly connect to Workday, only option that we are left with is to use Universal Adaptors provided by Oracle in DAC 10+ editions onwards (file adaptors).

However, to match the expected file format of file adaptors, a strong expertise in Workday Integration, Java along with XML basic knowledge is needed.

Using Oracle File Adaptors for Workday

That might sound unbelievable, but it works once you overcome above challenge and it works way smoother than PeopleSoft data source.  However, incremental load is not an effective option as Workday doesn't store history outside application (in files) beyond a point (that usually never exceeds 3 months).  So only option BI team is left with is to replicate delta in a set of tables (we can call them history tables) to compare the Workday data set on every following day.  Data archiving is not just a best practice but a necessity while using Workday as data source. Data is delivered via SFTP/FTP to ETL tool Source File location in various delimited files and we can limit the data based on our requirement of BI reporting

PeopleSoft data migration to Workday

For HRMS, Workday will take care of that but for BI system, all PeopleSoft tables must be migrated to data Warehouse which would be merged with staging tables of workday once we load the data from workday files (every time we execute out daily batch)

The big fight!

Leaving the competitors aside, customers expect PeopleSoft to be as simple as Workday.  On the other side, customers who had OBIEE as key reporting tool, expect Workday reporting to be as interactive as OBIEE-PeopleSoft reporting used to be. 

Who can gain out of this?

In this fight of simple versus complex, someone has huge gap to fill in.  Who?? Well "us", we "the IT service industry" can fill in that gap while that fight is going on.