Workday's Integration Cloud Platform, recognized by Gartner as an iPaaS (Integration Platform-As-A-Service) solution, reinforces the importance of such a strategy. This platform greatly reduces cost through the use of Workday's own infrastructure, provides choice in addition to what is offered by traditional development tools, and makes a community of Workday users available to businesses. With this platform, Workday integrations are developed, deployed and woven into your business processes. 

The platform provides customers with an array of development tools from creating quick interfaces through an online UI, to advanced interfaces through a feature-rich Eclipse-based IDE. It also provides the infrastructure to test and deploy your interfaces - no need to host any servers to make integrations work. The continued growth and adoption of Cloud technologies and Software-as-a-Service applications changes how we think about platform integrations and requires a different approach to integration design.

Implementers must not only excel in the technical details that enable this integration to work, they must also provide insights that allow businesses to get the most value out of their integrations. Integrations are no longer the traditional "point-to-point" solution of exchanging data between systems. Instead, they are an integral part of your business process, one that can make running your operations more efficient. Integrations should not only be about what data gets exchanged, but also about the why and the how.