University of Texas-Austin goes with Workday for finance, HR, payroll

Tom Paine

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Workday, the up and coming enterprise cloud company, has targeted higher ed as one of its
key verticals, reflecting the backgrounds of co-founders Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, who built a major presence in that market at Peoplesoft (acquired by Oracle).

Workday announced one of its biggest higher ed wins this week, The University of Texas at Austin. I haven't been able to confirm exactly what incumbent they are replacing (no response to my inquiry to Workday).

Why the release from Workday now, I'm not sure. UT announced on one of its websites that it had selected Workday last September and said in December that the contract had been approved by the UT System's Board of Regents.

This FAQ about the selection process posted on a UT website is interesting. It seems to indicate that Peoplesoft was the only competitive bidder.

This contract covers financial administration, human resources and payroll only. Another
RFP will be sent out for student information system bids. Workday is developing a student
information system and is beta testing it with some institutions.

Workday's existing higher ed customers include Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown and Yale.

Of course Ellucian, formed through the merger of SunGard Higher Ed and Datatel, is another large player in the market. Ellucian still has a large presence in Malvern.

Another interesting announcement this week came from Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. It said it was replacing its Oracle system with one from Netherlands-based ERP vendor UNIT4. I had not known that UNIT4 was active in the higher ed market.