Workday demo tenants

An interesting one I recently learned about...Workday offers what they term a 'Shared demonstration tenant' (to the named support contact at a customer site only).

It's basically a sample database with a limited number of user ids which is shared across the spectrum of Workday customers.  Workday provides this so that customers can see sample configurations, i.e. it's not for training or running a full business process, but rather for an occasional lookup, such as if you're thinking about implementing some new functionality.

Advantages:

• You can use this sample tenant to access sample configurations without having to pay for your own tenant.  Remember, WD (like most other Saas providers) charges per tenant.
• This is great if you're thinking about increasing your usage of functionality within HCM, for example, but as well if you only had HCM and were considering a complete expansion into another area such as Finance.  You can roam freely on your own, without being bothered by sales consultants filtering the information.

Disadvantages:

• As WD says, it's only a demo tenant with limited functionality.  It's not meant to prototype the full business process.  For example, it doesn't do proxy, nor can you make your own IDs!
• You're sharing it with lots of other customers.  If someone puts something ridiculous into it, you don't know if that comes from WD or another customer.
• It's refreshed every Monday and potentially during the week too, if things are broken.  Work quickly!

 

My take:

• I like it!  I come from a world where if you want a 'sample' set of configurations, then you're implementing a PeopleSoft vanilla database.  As we all know, databases take up space, i.e. cost, and vanilla is the first to go when we need to implement a training database.
• You're depending on the "Named Support Contacts" to not share this log-in info willy-nilly, which I think is a reasonable assumption for such a position.
• It provides value to customers.  You're not forced to take on the additional charges of an additional database when your usage is only going to be occasional.