Welcome to Amplify 2019 in Dallas. We're delighted that you are here and online. We are live streaming this today. I'm Stuart Miller, the CFO, and we're going to start with the obligatory safe harbor language to assuage the concerns of our general counsel. We are going to be making some forward-looking statements today. You're familiar with the disclaimer. We've got a great agenda, I think, and it's different from the kind of agenda we've run in past analyst days. We wanted to do a deep dive on our growth drivers. In the first session, Marty's going to talk, our CEO and co-founder, and then it's going to be followed by Will Gregg, who's going to give you a deep dive on Wdata.
Second session, which will be after lunch, will be a customer panel on Wdata, with two customers telling you how they're using that product. At 1:00 P.M., we start the later afternoon session. I'm going to talk briefly about acquisitions, then I'm going to be followed by Dermot Murray, who runs EMEA and also runs our Global Statutory Reporting team. We'll do integrated risk with Tad Finer, and partnerships with Mike Rost. We're going to try to leave time after each speaker for Q&A, then we'll have a wrap-up Q&A at the end, because that was the principal feedback we got from you last time, is that you wanted more time for Q&A. With that, let me hand it off to Dr. Marty Vanderploeg, our esteemed CEO and co-founder.
Okay. Hello? Hello? Hello, hello. There we go. Thank you, everybody, for coming today. It's always great to talk to you all and give you the chance to ask questions. Is there a clicker here for the slides or?
Yeah.
Oh, right here. Okay. There we go. I'm just going to sort of level set what we're trying to do as a company, and I would say that one of the key things that we keep coming across is we're really starting to define our own category. Finding your own category has benefits and negatives. One is, the negative is you're defining your own category, which takes time and effort. The good news is there's no competitors to speak of, and so we'll talk about that. I just really wanted to emphasize that in this whole discussion. Obviously, our go-to-market line now is connected reporting. With Wdata, we sort of completed that story. You can go straight from all different systems of record into what we sort of refer to as a system of work, and without any manual intervention whatsoever.
The classic process that is still pervasive, it's just staggering. Every large organization I've been in has the same thing. We've talked about this in the past. I just wanted to level set again. It's all Word and Excel and emails. It's no control, no connectivity. It's really a cluster. Obviously, where we position ourselves is in that position where we take that chaos and put it into an orderly process. Our primary value adds there, one is the linking of all the numbers, which is the connectivity. There's additional ones. One is the permissioning, which is a control feature. It lets certain people do certain things within the ecosystem, the reporting ecosystem. There's also the ability to collaborate multiple people, and then a really tight audit trail. Those are really the four primary value add features of our platform.
I also want to say the platform behaves just like the typical Word, Excel, Microsoft type of environment. The learning curve is very small. Just to debunk a couple things, and some of those have come out in our press releases today. We're in the same magic quadrant as some of the companies on the left. Some of the companies on the left really purport to do some of the things we do, but we really don't see that. We made a partnership with BlackLine, which we used to get the question about, how are you competing with BlackLine? We never compete with BlackLine. Same thing can be said about Anaplan. A lot of the companies that we're forming partnerships with as we speak. Our strategy is to be agnostic, to be totally independent and really use the Switzerland strategy to get as many partners as possible.
The partners squawk about that a little bit, at the end of the day, they're very willing partners. Obviously the value reaping is to connect everything, orchestrate data from different systems. You'll see that, if you stop by some of the pods to see what Wdata does, it's definitely worth that. Will's going to show you that as well here, if you want to go on a deeper dive, you can. Wdata, as I said, is really sort of the last piece to complete our connected reporting story. It really enables us to have a true total flow of data with no manual touching whatsoever. We can connect to many different systems already. We see reports and regulatory filings.
I think the one thing I want to emphasize is that, we're known for regulatory filings, but we see more and more of our customers realizing that when you automate this, you can flip a weekly performance report in a week or a day, I mean, a weekly performance report you can flip in a day. You can actually have the results in front of you in much less time than when you used to have to do this all manually. That is one of the biggest value adds, not just the compliance side of it. Just to touch on the TAM of these different areas. Stuart's talked about this TAM a lot, but this slide sort of just shows that where our TAM is relative to the others. We've looked at this TAM from a lot of different directions, and we feel really comfortable with it.
Just to touch briefly, make sure I get this number right, Stuart, 16? Is that the right number? 16 different solutions we currently market and have SKUs for and sell. There's over 140 different use cases that customers have found for the solution, and that number's growing daily. I do want to mention FedRAMP. We, last summer, completed the FedRAMP, the first level, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, I think it's called. That was announced last summer. The moderate process is very close to complete. That not only gives us access to the federal government, but it's really a standard for commercial as well. I mean, if you tell people you have FedRAMP moderate, a lot of the security questions go away. That's on track to happen this fall.
Actually, we'd have had it by now, but they had one or two different things they just introduced in terms of new requirements, so we're just finishing those two up. XBRL, this is another piece of the puzzle, frankly. We're seeing a lot of demand being driven by mandates in a number of different countries. Because XBRL is an integrated part of our platform, meaning any report you can tag after you've completed the report, that it really suits us well. We've talked about ESEF, and Dermot will talk about that later today. It really is a driving force to make companies do something and adapt technology like this. I'm not going to read all the bullet points, but you can see there's 147 mandates, and that number's expected to grow dramatically.
There's a bunch of them in the U.S. already in the pipeline that are going to be coming out over the next few years. This is going to be something that, in addition to the value you get from a connected reporting platform like ours, these mandates even accelerate the adoption. It's something that we really view as a growth driver. Here are those countries where a lot of those are. You see the U.S. has five, but I know of a number that are already percolating. FERC is going to come out. Some of the states are pushing on CAFR already, as I mentioned earlier today. This is only going to continue. You'll see Europe, by the way, has a lot of this, which is good.
That's part of the reason that we're expanding in Europe so aggressively right now, is they do have a lot of mandates that are ahead of us, and some of the countries are ahead of the U.S. The other thing that I think is really worth talking about, again, if you watched the keynote earlier today, the NextGen platform is really a growth driver for several reasons. One is increased scale, but also it was built with a microservices architecture, which lets us really move fast. The last couple of years, we've really been stuck in the slog of rebuilding the entire platform in a microservices architecture. Now we're emerging from that, so we'll be able to build specific solutions on that very easily. You'll see a real acceleration in features and purpose-made products for certain solutions. Also, a big emphasis on APIs.
The whole thing was built with APIs. We can choose when and how to open those up. We're already quite a ways down the road on opening up data APIs. In time, obviously, we'll start doing APIs to enable third parties to come in and start to get toward our ultimate goal of being a platform as a service. Next Generation, again, has the same typical components. Also Wdata, which should have been on this slide, Wdata is the last component of that, as I mentioned, sort of completed out the whole portfolio to make a fully connected ecosystem. Again, like I said, this was primarily just an update of a lot of stuff you've seen. I really want to emphasize the fact that that TAM slide, we have a huge amount of white space.
Really no legitimate competitors that are trying to sell a platform like we are. We have competitors within certain solutions, but not in terms of building a complete platform to do the connected reporting in the way that we do it. Any questions? Yes, sir.
Marty, I'll get [Cass].
Yeah. Maybe you could give us an update on Wdata. At breakfast, I was definitely talking to a lot of customers, and they were talking about it, and partners were talking about it. Maybe an update on Wdata in terms of what you're seeing on monetization, the attach rate of it and new business or with existing customers. Is it also helping drive additional use cases when it's being adopted?
Yeah, I'm happy to comment on that. We're in the early days of adoption. We have seen incredible success. You'll hear that in the panels, incredible success from the people that have adopted it, and it does drive more use cases. The minute you can put terabytes of data through a database without having to know SQL, and just doing more or less drop and drags, it really enables you to do a lot of things. We're definitely seeing great success when people adopt it, even though we're in the early days and in terms of the number that we've had. We're seeing a lot of interest, and we expect that to accelerate. Another question right there.
Hey, Marty. Thanks for having us. I was wondering, we'll probably get into this a little bit more later, but you guys have spoken about the European opportunity quite a bit.
Pardon?
You've spoken about the European opportunity quite a bit. I was hoping you could just give an update on your current thoughts on the ESMA mandate, what that can mean for your business, and particularly, with respect to the Inline XBRL chart you had. Would be really interesting to know how you think about that opportunity versus, say, how XBRL played out in the U.S. six, seven years ago. Is it similar? Can it work as fast? Are you as well prepared? Maybe take us through the parallels on that. That'd be great. Thanks.
Yeah. Dermot is going to spend some time on that. I will give you some high-level thoughts since you are asking. It has a lot of similarities to the U.S. We will and are prepared for the dates. It is not a heavy lift for us to switch to a different taxonomy, which we have already got working, and we do demonstrations already. The two significant differences that exist is one, we are dealing with a lot of different jurisdictions. I forget the number, but I think it is 20-some different jurisdictions where we will have to file, and typically they provide a way just to upload a file. The good news is we were worried that each of the jurisdictions was going to change the taxonomy slightly. We have not seen that. I just got an update on that yesterday.
We've seen very little to any change between the different jurisdictions, so we'll be able to have one taxonomy that customers can use to tag their data. They still have to do it. I don't really see that as an impediment. It's becoming clear that it's going to behave much like the U.S. They're doing the same thing as a tiered rollout. After the first rollout, there'll be chaos, 5,300 companies all trying to find someone to do it. They'll go to all sorts of different providers, and the same thing that happened in the U.S. It was very bifurcated, and then slowly all accumulated. I'm sure we'll get a nice bite right at the beginning, but it'll be sustained growth.
It'll follow very much the same as the U.S. pattern. The beauty of it is we've gone through that once, so we know just what to expect. We have the playbook how that works. The other thing is we have a lot better experience on pricing. When we first stood the company up, we were selling at a very much lower price just to accumulate logos. We don't have to do that this time. We can put a fair price out there and not have to go through that whole process of a lot of early adopters at a lower price. Differences, but a lot of similarities. I'm holding it the wrong way.
Marty, thanks for having us. My question was on partnerships, because you've had, in the past, KPMG, I think that was last year or year before, and then this morning with Deloitte. You've been ramping your sales headcount, but it seems like the partnerships are becoming more of a focus, too, and the leverage that you guys get from those. Could you just talk about the importance of those partnerships and adding the Deloitte one this morning and what those mean?
Yeah. Happy to talk about that. I've talked about this in the past. People might say that we're a little late to the party on doing partnerships. There were some fundamental issues. First off, our first solution was so light touch, it was hard for partners to make much money. It was very easy to put up. That was part of our secret sauce, frankly, for taking the market so quick. We're going to have that same advantage in ESEF. It's very easy to put up and get people going. As we've gotten into connected reporting, integrating with a lot of other source systems, integrating with their other reporting systems, integrating with their BI tools, all the stuff that Will's going to talk some more about after I'm done here, it becomes a pretty big lift to put that stuff together.
We also wanted to go slow. We want a demand situation. These large partners that we've been dealing with now, it's really been a pull. They've come to us, and they're seeing demand in the marketplace. The Deloitte opportunity, there was a number of totally different use cases that we closed joint business, and that really got their attention at a high level. Some of it was risk related, some of it was financial reporting, some of it was specific to financial services verticals. They just keep finding more stuff where it applies. The last thing is, the reason I like to wait for that pull is because at the end of the day, you get a better business outcome for both parties when they're sitting on equal ground, in terms of negotiating how you're going to go to market.
We're really happy with where the partner stuff is going. The pull is really strong now, and you can see from the list of people and the press releases we're putting out, and that will continue. We're very optimistic. It's going to be a key part of our growth strategy, because to deliver at the volume we have to deliver now, we can't do it. We need the partners. There's opportunities. Some of the early pricing proposals we've seen, there's tons of room for these partners to make money, and that's what drives them bringing you into accounts. When they can see the dollars, they come.
Hey, you talked about the opportunity with the new platform to accelerate new products, feature sets, purpose-built solutions. Just curious, have any of those come out yet? Where are you in that, and when can we start to see that acceleration show up?
We are just at the early days of that. We're just finishing up the rebuild of the platform, and we're just starting to transition customers. We've had very good success on a lot of the different components transitioning customers. Some are still a lot of work to do. In terms of developing purpose-made features, that'll start late Q4, and it'll really start next year. To give you just an example, we'll put a team on Global Stat. It's real interesting, when you take our platform and you apply it to a problem, it works well for Global Stat right now. It really does. We have a number of customers that use it for Global Statutory Reporting. They're big numbers of users, so they're a nice deal size.
When we look at it, there's usually a handful of features that can take it from a good solution to just a really dominant solution that's really world-class. We're going to assign a small team that just works on the platform and creates those specific features that are needed to take it from really good to world-class. You'll see most of that starting next year, frankly.
Yeah. Longer term, I think you've talked about feeling confident that you can reach, I think, $150,000 revenue per customer on an annual basis, which I think is like a doubling or more of sort of your current run rate. Is that a function of some of these expanding non-SEC use cases, these purpose-built functions, Wdata? Can you just kind of provide some more color as to how you get there?
Yeah. It's certainly having expansion in the accounts and the new use cases. It's not going to be based on price optimization. No, it's all about new users, new use cases, and like I said, we're seeing a lot of new use cases we're excited about, especially when we get into verticals. When we get into some of the financial services verticals, energy verticals. There's a FERC mandate coming for XBRL in the energy industry. We see all of that growth in total revenue per customer is going to come from new solutions. Or the lion's share of it, I should say. Hold on. Oh, we're out of time.
Can we do just one more maybe?
Okay, go ahead. Do one more.
Yeah.
I was thinking, I know it's early days with Wdata. Is there any kind of early indication of like an uplift when Because it seems like a pretty robust solution, like an uplift to like an ACV when they actually go to that solution. I guess also, is it priced in terms of as you add more integration points and you're integrating more data into that platform, does the pricing per customer go up with that, or is it just based on the solution?
Well, remember, we use a workspace model. If they get Wdata in an SEC reporting workspace, which we're seeing some traction there because they want to complete the connection. Typically we have it be a percentage of their spend. It's a significant percentage. I really don't want to say how much, but it's significant. If they want to use Wdata for Global Statutory Reporting, that's another workspace. They have to, again, choose to use it in that workspace, and it's another uptick as a percentage of spend. It will be a significant increase in ACV per workspace and also per customer in general. It's a big part of our strategy, for sure.
We're going to stop questions now.
I'm going to-
Move on.
I want to introduce Will, right? Is that the next thing, Stuart?
Yep.
We got to get some mics that can transmit through my hand. I want to introduce Will Gregg. How long has it been, Will, a year and a half?
Yeah. Almost two, yeah.
Almost what?
Almost two.
Almost two years ago, we saw the potential of the Wdata play. We were in the midst of a very intense replatforming activity on our R&D team, and we figured the only way we could do that effectively was to build a team outside of the current R&D team and let it act more entrepreneurial as sort of a SWAT team, and we nicknamed it the Scout Team. Will lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Glad the hurricane missed that. We have a small office there, and I think he has about 10 people now. Is that right? He has done a fantastic job of leading that team, not only on developing the product, but the go-to-market strategy. I'll let Will take over and do some discussion on Wdata.
Thanks, Marty. I've got it on.
Oh, you got it on. That's good.
I'm hands-free, man.
That's good.
Future.
Boom.
Thanks for the introduction, Marty. My intent today was just to kind of walk through, we've got about 30 minutes, and I think where I'm going to start is just to try to give everybody a high-level understanding of where Wdata fits, why we pursued it. I think one thing that Marty didn't mention is, I've got sort of an interesting background, in some ways similar to a lot of the folks that put the company together. I have a mechanical engineering background. I was a practicing engineer for a couple of years, but the majority of my career actually selling. Quite a bit of that here at Workiva as well, worked with a lot of our large enterprise customers.
When Marty kind of hearkens back a couple of years ago when we saw this opportunity, the opportunity itself presented even earlier than that, right? It was a lot of those discussions with these large enterprise customers trying to understand, not only how we can help them expand, but how they can sort of understand how they expand themselves. We felt like there was a real opportunity to help in some areas where we didn't see a lot of products in the space. You guys have seen, I think at some point or another, everybody's seen some version of this slide. We showed one at keynote just a little bit earlier.
This is a little different coloring, but the piece that's really important is the source of record, all of this information that was on the left side of this is where companies have been investing obscene amounts of money over the years. The challenge is all that piece in the middle is where they're losing all that investment, right? They're kind of piling money into these systems of record, but the efficiency, when we pull that out, is just not there. If you look at that last piece, largely Workiva's been very successful capturing this last segment. How does Wdata transform our go-to-market strategy and the way our customers adopt our platform?
The first piece is, I think you'll hear a lot about this this week, and if you talk to customers, you'll hear a lot about this, but we wanted to start with a comprehensive integration strategy. That means, in kind of today's terms, a couple things. It means that we're going to have to integrate with cloud and on-prem systems, right? We've got these hybrid infrastructures. A lot of what we see is systems of record, ERPs, GLs, reconciliation, consolidation. Obviously, those are systems that a lot of our customers have invested heavily in. What we also see is a lot of legacy architecture, right? In that prior slide, this kind of middle area, it's interesting the number of people that will go out and hire a consultant to go build some custom database, right?
We'll spend a huge amount of money, and the person who built it leaves. You talk to them two years later, and there's this system that's kind of lingering on life support. Nobody really understands how to use it or how to get value out of it. We see a ton of that, right? It doesn't matter the size of company or sophistication of company. We see it across the board. Connector strategy is great. That's going to help us plug into best-of-breed products. We're going to be able to do that really quickly and in a very productized way. I'll actually show you a little bit of that. APIs, you probably read a lot recently or may have read a lot recently, that's the future of SaaS, right? That's the skeleton key for integration. It's kind of the best way to describe it.
We'll actually, in the customer panel, in a couple of hours, we'll actually hear from Scott Pach from City of Missoula. Their integration strategy was just using the API because they had a legacy system that was kind of on life support. Clearly, no one's going to invest in building a connector back to that legacy system. Using our APIs, they were able to really quickly get up and running. It complements our connector strategy. The last piece is tabular data, which we'd all like to pretend it doesn't exist, but the reality is it's prolific, right? I mean, the slide Marty showed that had the diagram of all the disconnected things floating around. That's a huge part of that still is just spreadsheet data. It's tabular.
Generally, this slide reads left to right, but you'll notice some things that are interesting, like we've got Wdesk spreadsheets as a source, right? There's some really valuable workflows. I just want to help everybody understand that this can go both ways, right? We can pull information back up into those source systems, and there's a lot of customers that have asked us to do that. We can pull it out, and we can loop through these processes to support whatever the business need is. This connected data piece, that's the Wdata experience, right? That's where you're going to work and build reports. You're going to connect those. You're going to bring and synthesize all the source data. The way that that happens is pretty simple, right?
If you read this, again, left to right, the data from those connectors is almost all tabular, right? Pretty much all of these sources of record are some database, right? Most of them are relational in nature. The data's really simple. It's tabular data as it comes out. We pull it in and we load it into these tables, and these tables are set up to support vast volumes. We've got a customer that wants to do 50 million records a day, right? They want to load that. They're going to cut that out into 200 entities and they want to be able to automate that flow of bringing all that data in, cutting it out, and distributing it to their teams.
The next little piece of that, those hashes that sort of represents the report building query experience, it's where we take all that data and we blend it together. We filter it. We turn it into just a random assortment of transactions into things that are valuable for the people who want to understand it. Ultimately, what we've got is a really clean connection into our spreadsheet layer, which is if we think about this from a persona perspective, the left side, this is going to be IT and data governance. It's the new audience for us to talk to. Their role in this is they've got to be responsible for helping the end business users capture that information, but do it in a way that's secure, do it in a way where it's governed well.
Everybody's sort of afraid of the Wild Wild West of data, so we have a lot of controls in place to make sure that everything is auditable and everything's tracked and kind of our legacy as a company has really been fully implemented here as well. This middle layer, right, these business analysts, I imagine that actually quite a number of you guys have had experiences doing these types of things, right? Where you're going to have probably a spreadsheet model somewhere, or lots of them that are going to fit together. My guess is some of that's going to be sourced from conversations like this or from reading a board deck or from going to an analyst day. Some of that's probably going to be sourced from companies like Bloomberg and other financial information services.
That comes together, the intersection of those two things creates context, right? That's how you make decisions. Our customers are no different. It's just a different set of sources and syncs and data that they care about. The last piece is I want to be clear here that we own reporting, right? This is the space that I think we dominate in the enterprise, we also have to complement other products, that's part of our maturity as a company is making sure that we do what we do extraordinarily well, we also can fit that into other products that our customers use and like. Things like Anaplan for planning or things like BlackLine for reconciliation, right?
There's other products that exist adjacent to what we do, and the better we can integrate and work with those products, the more value we can deliver to our customers. Okay. That last layer, I think just, again, so everybody's clear, that's really where most of Workiva's users are today. One of the challenges here is just having that conversation with a different audience. We're starting to, as I've already talked about the adoption rate and things like that, part of that is just learning how to have those conversations, learning how to help the IT and data governance people be comfortable with what we're advocating for the business and the analysts sit in the middle and help orchestrate that process. It's something that we're obviously very excited about. It seems very sensible.
I think my observation over the years interacting with lots of clients, hundreds and hundreds of meetings in the field, is that this is largely unsolved, right? It's crazy given the amount of money that goes into these other systems, that this area is still just the Wild West. I think there's a great opportunity there for us. I'm going to show you a quick demo. Again, I'm not going to go into a vast amount of detail on this demo, what I want to do is, this can seem a little esoteric maybe when you look at the slide, I just want to help everybody understand.
Can you remind me, Tom, what LOB is?
Line of business. Thank you, Stuart. Yeah. This is just line of business reporting. This is your typical, we've got a bunch of them at Workiva, and even someone like myself, right? I've got line of business reporting that I have to do, and we use the tool ourselves. This is just our classic users. Thanks, Stuart. All right. Give me just a sec here to get plugged in. This is not going to be telecast, right?
Yeah. The people watching on the website right now, we're going to do a live demo that's not going to be able to patch into our slides. If you can just listen in, and we'll describe it, but unfortunately, we're not able to physically show that on the webcast, and we'll be moving the slides forward as soon as we are.
All right. Let's see if I can do this without breaking anything. No, I'm okay. Okay. Still a little awkward, but I don't think the cord's going to reach. Okay. If you recall back to that slide I showed, we're moving left to right, system of record, connected data, reporting, stakeholder. Okay. We're going to walk through this thing in that order so we can understand how all the pieces fit together. Before we do that, I just want to start with a typical representation of something that a customer might do in Wdesk, right? This is a close deck, monthly close performance deck, that's synthesizing data from a bunch of different sources. In this particular case, we've got actual versus forecast. We've got some Anaplan forecast data coming in. We've got some Anaplan budget data coming in.
We've got some reconciliation data because we want to look at close performance, that's going to actually be coming from BlackLine. Then we've got information coming directly out of Oracle, which in this case is our consolidated GL. One interesting thing, and this is also very common, is, in this case, APAC. Our APAC division is, in this case, an acquisition. They actually don't run our consolidated GL because we haven't integrated them yet. They have their own. We're going to be pulling that particular set of financials from a completely different source of record, and then we're going to bring all that together to create this final report. Hopefully, that makes sense. We'll have some time for questions at the end. We want to start with this new experience, right?
This is something that we just released. Marty talked about it in keynote. This is really a huge part of, I think, our transformation as a company, is the ability to now connect directly to these systems of record and do it in a really modern, user-friendly way. It's important to point out, I think when we looked at what was the right way to solve this problem, there's a lot of companies in this space, and they're companies that you guys are probably aware of, right? I mean, iPaaS is a defined sector. There's defined categories. You've got companies like Informatica, Boomi, and MuleSoft, a bunch of companies in this space. What's interesting for us is for us to go to market effectively with our customer base, their preference is that we not introduce a third party, right?
Because they've come to trust Workiva, they trust our infrastructure, our master term service, and all the things that we've built this trust with them over the years. One of the things we really wanted to do, if possible, was actually try to OEM a product into our solution that would get us to value quickly, allow us to put a lot of capability in our customers' hands, but not be spread so thin on our vision for the product, right? We can have a team who's very capable, who wakes up every morning and eats, sleeps, and breathes connectivity, and we can think about how we take advantage of that capability through our reporting platform. Some of you may have seen a press release that went out about a OneCloud partnership. That's kind of the engine that powers us underneath.
Again, we've fully OEM'd that. It's running in our infrastructure. It's covered by our RM. All of the trust that Workiva's built covers this product. This is just a Chain, which is just a series of little actions that we build, and it's really simple to do this. I think one of the things I wanted to point out is that for our users, the goal is not for this to be a business user, but the goal is for this to be an incredibly lightweight rapid delivery capability for an IT function, or for a financial systems analyst, the support function to the business that's more technical. It doesn't require code. It doesn't require writing any scripts or anything like that. It's very much little building blocks that build on one another.
Go grab data from here, go load data to here, go query that data, go deliver that to a sheet. It's just a sequence of events that all fit together in a very simple, understandable way, and you can interrogate them. One of the things that's nice about that is we can go back, and we can look at every single run that this chain ever went through, and we can see when it was successful and when it failed and why it failed, and we can, again, interrogate all that stuff and set up alerting and all those wonderful things. Really, really simple. What we're going to do, actually, is we're going to run this little chain, and I'll kind of kick it off, and then we'll talk through some other pieces while this is running. This thing's going to start.
It's going to trigger that call. It's going to reach out to Anaplan, go grab some data, load it up to Wdata. It's going to go grab some HFM data, load it up to Wdata. While it's doing that, one of the things I want to also point out is how easy it is to establish a connection. Again, a lot of our customers will say, "Well, how do we connect to," or, "Can you connect to XYZ?" It's a pretty comprehensive list, right? Again, focused on the systems of record that our customers care about most today. You can see we've got planning, analytics packages. We've got virtually the entire Oracle stack. Essbase, HFM, all the way down. We've got tons of connectivity there. Great SAP support. ServiceNow. Tableau. Products that, again, exist kind of in our periphery that are really important for our customers.
Now we have the ability to seamlessly orchestrate that information both ways. We'll grab data out of one of those tools, for example, Anaplan, and then if we do some work, we can send it back. That's kind of the value of how this works. If we go look at that chain, we can see it's still running, and we can see it's kind of just slowly sequencing through all those operations. Where that's going to land is here in Wdata, and we're just going to look at this budget table. Again, don't get too mired in the details here. The piece I want to point out is that this is just a table, and you can see the preview at the bottom. It's just tabular data that's being fed in.
Each one of those files on the right-hand side is a load. You can see they're timestamped. We can see exactly when they came in. In this case, we used our connection process. We have kind of a user, a bot, if you will, that's actually running that process every two hours. There's a sequence of them that was running last night just to kind of populate some data. That's what the tabular data looks like. What we do is we build from that table, we build these queries or these reports, and they just compose the data together, and it's really, really simple. The left-hand side is effectively like the dictionary of all of the data that we have at our disposal to report on. Each of those little pills, those are just items that are parts of these tables.
Again, if I were to look at maybe that APAC GL data, there's all the dimensions of data that were loaded in that APAC GL. As you look through on the right-hand side, all you're seeing is just these little pills dragged onto a report. Each one of those pills is going to represent a column in the final report. At the bottom, that's where a lot of the horsepower comes in. What that's doing is that's actually joining these disparate data sets. It's bringing together things, and in this case, you'll see, where is it? The APAC mapping, sort of in the bottom right. In this case, remember, the story is that APAC was an acquisition, right? We actually don't have the same account hierarchy for our HFM instance as we do for our kind of institutional consolidated financials.
What this lets us do is it actually lets us kind of mimic a roll-up in our consolidated financials just by doing this kind of ad hoc and assigning the GL data to this table. Again, allows us to kind of fold these disparate systems into one single consolidated set of data. What we can do from this data is we can actually interrogate it, right? In this case, we've loaded up some data from Anaplan. You can see we've built a quick, very simple pivot. I imagine quite a few of you are familiar with how that works. You can see we can just kind of drill through, we can interrogate this information. One of the things that I use quite a bit, actually, is the ability to do this in visual form.
We can look and we can see, oh, in North America, that's great. What's in North America? I can unpack that and I can see all the elements that exist within North America, right? I can keep sort of drilling through and interrogating that data. We can rebuild it all live. If we need to move any of these, you can see on the right-hand side, that's kind of a classic pivot experience. It's not just the ability to bring that data in and ship it off to Wdesk, but it's also the ability to come back when things maybe don't make sense to us in Wdesk. Maybe we got a consolidated number that we don't quite trust, don't quite understand how it got there. Maybe it looks like it got miskeyed or something.
We can come back in and we can use some of these quick ad hoc analytics tools to figure out what's actually going on there. Once it leaves Wdata, again, kind of following, again, recall that slide left to right. Once it leaves Wdata, it's going to typically land in spreadsheets. For us, spreadsheets are kind of the Everybody works in spreadsheets, right? I mean, that's the reality. That's the reason why that connected mess exists. I think the value, obviously, of Workiva spreadsheets is we bring those from an uncontrolled environment into a tightly, highly controlled, auditable environment. We can give people a similar experience, but we can do it while reducing a tremendous amount of risk that would exist if they did that outside of Workiva.
What's really cool here, and this is, again, I'm not aware of anybody who does this the way that we do it in the cloud this way, but every single one of these little elements on the right-hand side, these Wdata connections, you can see these little pills. Each of those connects to a query in Wdata. Real quickly, I could go run that chain, for example, if we want to look at one of these. We loaded that data set up. Go all the way back to the beginning. We can see that completed successfully. Okay. I'm going to close these out, and I just want to show you how that data loaded. What we're going to do is we're actually going to show how that flows all the way through to that final report.
We're just going to go grab this table data. You can see right here on the right-hand side, September 10th, 10:34 A.M. It's a lot smaller on my screen. You guys can probably see it better. That was that load we just did, right? When we hit that button, it was kind of running in the background. It's just triggering all that information to flow into Wdata. Now what's cool is because all that reporting is built in an automated way and it's all plumbed up to our spreadsheet, the only thing that the spreadsheet user has to do is hit one button. They just come over here, and they hit Refresh all.
What that did is that triggered every report in Wdata to run, recompose all that information, ship all that back to the spreadsheet, and then all of the links that feed all of our reporting that's derived from that one master set of data, all just got updated, right? I think in this case, it's about 1,050 data elements with a single click that just updated. It gives us the ability to really highly automate a lot of this activity. As we look through here, once that data loads up, we can publish those links and ship them all the way back through to that reporting layer. Without going into great detail, we have a lot of tooling as well to be able to walk that back.
If I see a number, kind of quick example would be maybe a number here in a chart, and I can view that chart series data, and I can see that that data is linked. If I follow those linked properties, I can actually walk that back and see the source, right? I know that originated in this Europe section of that spreadsheet. Click it, takes me right there. Kind of up and down, the ability to walk that information through. Now, I think the piece that's really powerful for us and for our customers is from the time the data leaves that system of record or that origin system to the time it gets to that final report, it never leaves our ecosystem. It's entirely controlled from start to finish. It takes very little time. Yeah. That's it.
I'll take some questions if you guys have them.
Just one thing I wanted to add. You set up all these connections ahead of time, so you can have a whole set of reports set up, and every time the source data changes. You can update it every two hours, every day. You can update it on a poll only if you don't want a push happening. You can get the reports immediately as soon as you upload the new data. This allows you to do weekly performance reports or quarterly or any time interval reports and literally have them the very next day, where in the past, it's a several-day process of people manually doing this.
Marty brings up a really good point. One of the other pieces when we were kind of trying to design this is that we knew the people that live in spreadsheets are not the people. It's not the same skill set, it's not the same kind of archetype of person that's going to live in Wdata and do all those transformations, right? Those are the types of people, generally a financial analyst or senior financial analyst, their next promotion hinges on a special project delivery, right? I think, again, for folks in the room, that's probably not an unfamiliar thing. Those folks really understand how all the pieces fit together, and so they live in Wdata. They compose a lot of the data architecture for these downstream teams to consume.
What we wanted to be able to do for the downstream teams, though, is, without any complexity at all, have them be able to kind of modify the data sets to suit their reporting needs. If we edit this connection, we can see, like in this case, this is a really simple one, but we've actually passed through some parameters from that report that allow the end user in the spreadsheet to roll this forward simply by changing that date. They just change it from 9/30 to December 31st, hit refresh, it's done, right? Each user has the ability to kind of configure the reporting depending on how we design it so that everything's controlled.
It is worth noting, too, that of the transactions we've had around this, half tend to be in the category Will just mentioned, which is financial analysts sort of stretching our legs out into FP&A. The other half have been SEC people just wanting a direct connection. We see not only the ability to go to our current customers and have success moving this capability, we also see it allowing us to move into FP&A over time. It not only enhances our current customer, but also extends the customer base.
I'll actually kill this and plug back in because there's kind of an interesting piece of what Marty just said, too. When we talk to customers, the thing that's interesting is. It's kind of obvious when you think about it, right? The supply of information sort of creates demand for our reporting platform, which is really interesting. The more information we can get into that connected layer from different sources, right, where again, this is in a typical enterprise, there's not really a great way to do this, or there isn't one single location. Companies may have an EDW. It's not accessible. Doesn't have a reporting layer. Hard to get at, right? Tightly governed. We're trying to strike that balance between kind of control, flexibility, and usability, kind of sit right in the middle.
I think there's obviously the play for Wdata by itself and then how that, it's kind of an add-on, and then how that fits in with Wdesk is pretty interesting because we see folks go, "Wow, now that I have all this information, there's value in maybe hooking up to another team as well.
Hey, thanks for that. You might have mentioned this during your walkthrough.
Sure
What's the technology that powers all of those integrations in Wdata? Is it something Workiva proprietarily built, or is it something MuleSoft or Informatica?
The connections are actually powered by OneCloud. That's the technology partner we use to kind of support that change pulling experience. The kind of underpinning of Wdata itself is actually like a distributed query engine. It's really high scale, so we can put loads and loads of information in there.
The Wdata technology itself is our technology. The connectors we showed you were our third party that we've integrated right into our actual build process. They run on our cloud. Their container's actually delivered to us, so that way it's covered under all of our security regimes, and authentication and all that is in one environment. It's just seamless to the end customer.
Yeah. Again, when you hear from Scott later, what's interesting is if you kind of just took out that top left box on the slide, everything else we've been doing since we launched in July of last year. That connector piece, though, for ease of use for our customers and ease of deployment, that's such a critical piece. Frankly, for partners. When you talk about really getting kind of hooks into those systems that matter so that we can aggregate all that information, we really wanted to make that easier. You think about if you took that little top left connector piece off the slide, everything else is 100% Workiva owned and developed, right? That one little connector piece is kind of our partnership.
Hey, Will, can you just go through the monetization strategy and how you get customers to pay for this? In other words, a lot of different ways to go about it in terms of number of connectors, number of seats. How have customers embraced what you've brought to market? Perhaps you could just kind of talk about that monetization strategy. Thanks.
Stuart, you got thoughts on that?
Come on, Stuart.
Well, I'll start the conversation and let Stuart chime in, too. In terms of, again, how we're monetizing this is, again, a percentage of what the current spend is. Like I said, it's a pretty substantial percentage, and we have not seen an impediment to that at all in terms of getting the transaction done. The value is very apparent to the customer. We can go in and before we even go to sell this, we'll set up a simple example with their actual data. The selling friction has been fairly low. The issue is always getting the right person in the room as always. To Will's point, most of our SEC reporting customers will have some other person that's either on their team or very close to their team that would help set this up.
They have more of a background in databases and things like that. We haven't really seen friction in terms of monetization. The value is very apparent.
I think that covered it, other than to just say it's always an add-on sale, right? It's always an upgrade. It's an upsell that enhances the value of the Wdesk platform. Terry.
Yeah, I was just going to ask about in the large enterprise market, they do have IT people, and they do like writing lines of code.
Yeah.
It keeps them employed. Has there been any inertia on the large enterprise side? Well, we could do this. Secondly, I just wanted to ask, I always have multi-part questions, by the way. With your 16 solutions.
True
set, is Wdata available for that in all 16 of those workspaces, or is there still more work to do for the applicability? Thank you.
I'll answer your last question first. The answer is yes, it's available for all of those solutions. The first question is interesting because you're right. The way I describe it to people right now is we see kind of both, and I don't know what the split is. I couldn't tell you in percentage terms, but we see two kind of interesting cultures around IT. We see one culture is very much kind of siloed, institutional, "We own it, no one else touches it." The kind of newer school, more modern approach to IT is kind of they support the business, and that is their customer. I think they kind of wake up every morning and say, "Well, how can I make my business more successful?" That second category of person is someone who we have really good resonance with, right?
I think when you talk about what they do every day, remember, they've got huge multi-million or multi-hundred million dollar deployments of technology that they're doing and managing all the time. Do they want to manage an integration to Anaplan? Probably not, right? For them, this is a way to empower the business with some oversight and control, but not in such a way that requires tremendous work or effort from them. They've got other things that they want to prioritize. If we can kind of come in, quickly clear that obstacle, "Yep, we can connect." "Yep, it's easy," it's been a really positive discussion in most, even surprisingly so in some cases. I expected a lot more friction early than we've seen there.
Hello? There we go. There's all different bifurcations of that experience. First off, you can write as complex a SQL query as you want in this tool just by going to the advanced part. We see some very gnarly queries put together. Also, we have a higher-level language for sort of the simpler stuff that an accounting team would use. We find that oftentimes, even in accounting, there'll be one person there that knows enough about data to set this up very easily. We don't even get to IT many times. Just to what Will is saying, we're seeing a trend of IT going from, "Don't touch my house," to, "I want to make my customer happy.
If this is the quickest and best way to do it, and the customer already is using this tool for other things, let's just plug this in and go." It's definitely a trend where I see less and less of that IT impediment. I think IT teams are realizing they have to reinvent themselves as well.
That's right.
Getting SaaS cloud stuff going and becoming just very good at that, and building their value to the organization through supporting that. It's not something we run into. Once in a while, we have someone that has their database that they say everything has to go into, and we're not going to have any other databases around, but it's very rare nowadays.
Terry, for those who don't want to reinvent, the argument is, this enhances the investment you've already made, right? You don't have to change anything. This will let you have a longer life with that ERP that costs you $30 million. That's the argument.
We have a little bit of time for more questions, if anyone else has a question in the room. Alex.
You mentioned thus far, about half the sales going to sort of a new group, the FP&A group. Talk about the challenges and opportunities of sort of getting the right person in the room as it relates to those new customers.
Yeah. I was going to say, it's kind of interesting the way a lot of the dialogue starts. When you talk to people here at Amplify, a lot of them are going to be accounting users, right? Their whole life is going to be spent in that top right box. What they know is that they want the data that exists on that top left. They just don't know really how to get it. It's sort of been an interesting experience. Again, we're kind of learning through that process as well, just how to have those discussions and walk that back, how to get the right people in the room when we're having dialogue. A lot of times, to Marty's point, we do have a relationship there.
Finance is nearly adjacent enough to accounting that we typically have a couple people that are kind of crossover users and understand what we do and where we fit. If we've got champions in the organization from a technical perspective, and again, oftentimes we do, they kind of understand this. We're getting better at it.
I think traditionally, we are able to get to FP&A pretty easily through the accounting team. It's sort of like a good reference. The accounting team tends not to want to go around and endorse things, but they've been a way for us to get there. 100% transparency. When we went there without Wdata, we had limited success. We did. We just didn't have what they wanted, and we actually got a lot of feedback on what they did want, this ability to pivot these big tables of data and pull out all sorts of different reports that actually speak to the performance of the business, more so than what you're looking at historically.
I think that, having gone through quite a few FP&A meetings, learning what we needed to build, help us build this, and I think that we'll be able to get back to those people in a pretty good clip.
Yeah, that's a challenging job, too, when you're in it, right? A lot of your success in the role is the accessibility of the information you need to report on. We talk to people who spend a lot of time trying to figure that out.
We have one minute left. Oh, we had a question?
Which one? I see. Oh, sorry. You're hiding.
Thanks. Could you just remind us when you guys started selling Wdata, and how much customer adoption have you seen so far?
Yeah, I'll take that one. It's an interesting process you go through. You start selling it before it's ready. That's always what you do. You call it MVP 1 or whatever, and you're really going out to let the product teams understand what's going on with the product in use. We started, July was it, Will, last year?
Yeah. July of last year.
July of last year, and we put in some installations and learned, and Will and his team would visit a lot of those customers. In terms of adoption, we've seen some customers put up, some of the larger financial institutions, multiple instances of this, right?
In terms of, without saying customer names. Tens of instances. In some of the uses, we've let them just use it at will, and it sort of spread throughout the org, and then we go back and start to talk to them about pricing and things. We had success doing that and a couple things that led to really nice deals for us. We're very optimistic about the adoption. Again, it's early days. From my point of view, that's a good thing. We have a lot of white space in which to grow the company.
Marty, I think you mentioned there's still a lot of work to be done on the platform as a whole, I guess in that context, how should we think about where you are in the overall R&D investments in terms of reaching your longer-term end goal for a truly open platform?
That's a good question. As you all know, our R&D spend is higher than the typical SaaS company. Stuart reminds me daily of that. Daily, I get an email or a club over the head or something. I will say this, we value every part of our organization, product marketing, we value our sales team. We're getting better at all those functions every day. First and foremost, we're a product company. That's what we are. We're not going to change our identity and our culture. We will try to get that number down, but it's going to take time. We have a lot to build, and it's not stuff we're building for fun. We just see a lot of business opportunities. We're going to keep that investment going, like I mentioned, on Global Stat and other large verticals where there's large potential for us.
We're going to keep that R&D investment going to build world-class products on our platform for those. We learned with the SEC, when you build a world-class product, we just took that market almost too fast, because it was so much better than any other product out there. I guess, not Steve Jobs' personality, but I certainly endorse his mantra of build the very best product and the company will be fine. Long answer. I should have just said that we expected the R&D spend to decline over time, but it's going to take a while, just because we see opportunity, not because we feel we have to make everything the same as the first platform. We're not. Not that we're just chronic builders of software. We're very methodical in building stuff that adds value, and we can charge money for. This is a business.
Yeah. Regarding the openness question, it's not binary. The cool thing is, as Marty mentioned, we started more than 24 months ago. The ability for us to have the foresight to know, okay, when we build this piece, it's going to be wide open from the outset. We did that, right? This piece is ready for prime time from an openness perspective. You'll start to see that cascade through things. Wdata is wide open, spreadsheets are open, there's a lot of that progress that's already been made.
The rate of speed at which we can develop stuff will, over the course of 2020, accelerate, just because more and more of the core functionality is done and more of those people will be pivoted to purpose-built solutions. On top of that, building on this platform, they can build purpose-built solutions much, much faster than our old platform, which was not microservices based. I'm excited about our R&D spend. I know the investment community isn't always excited about it. I know Stuart's not excited about it. I'm very excited about it because that's what builds future revenue growth. When I look at companies, if they have a low R&D spend, I'm not an investor. It's just that simple. That's my own two cents philosophy.
We probably have time for one more question.
Well, since there wasn't a quick question, I want to just introduce someone in the back. Oh, there was. I'm sorry, go ahead, and then I'm going to introduce someone in the back. Oh, well, perfect timing. Julie, could you stand up, please? Julie is our new Chief Operating Officer. She starts in October 1st, and she just came here to get immersed in this. Do not attack her with questions because she knows nothing. No offense, Julie. I'm just trying to make sure that they know you know nothing. We're very excited. She has a lot of experience in building large-scale platforms. True to our character, her background's in product. We have very good leadership in all parts of the company.
As we start to build her operational skills in the other parts of the business, which I'm sure will go fine, I just love to have the strong product underpinning there. We're very excited to have Julie on board. We are very picky about executives we bring on, so we vetted her every which way from Sunday, and she's the real deal. We're very excited about that, and leave her alone. Okay, we're going to take a What?
Click. You can click forward.
Oh, yeah. Sorry, I should click forward. Do you have the-
Oh, thank you.
You got it? Well, one more.
Okay.
One more. There we go. We're going to be back in this room at noon for a customer panel on Wdata, and then we'll kick off the third session at 1:00. In the interim, please go visit the expo, talk to customers, talk to partners and sponsors, and grab some lunch.