Collaborative Solutions and OneSource Virtual offer enriched services to Workday customers

Collaborative Solutions and OneSource Virtual’s deal focuses each service provider on its respective strengths

Cognizant’s Workday practice, Collaborative Solutions, has entered an agreement to acquire the professional services and application management practices of OneSource Virtual (OSV), which will hold onto its BPaaS (business process as a service) offering. The acquisition, expected to close by year-end 2022, enables both Workday partners to support their respective strategies and roadmaps. HRO and CFO executives can look forward to enriched service offerings from both partners.

Cognizant adds significant scale with its second Workday services acquisition

Cognizant acquired Collaborative Solutions in 2020. Collaborative has extensive experience in delivering the full range of services for Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Financial Management (FM), and Student. It has the added benefit of leveraging the wider Cognizant skills and delivery capabilities. Adding OSV’s professional services and application management services (AMS) experts increases Collaborative’s practice by approximately 400 experienced people. This deal aligns with Collaborative’s strategy to strengthen its support services portfolio, which it calls Continuous Value Services (CVS). Collaborative also acquires OSV’s proprietary assets developed for professional services and AMS. These include OSV’s Inspect automated testing tool, its Insight customer project and consultant management tool, and its data conversion tool.

Collaborative Solutions strengthens medium enterprise capabilities in North America

Collaborative and OSV serve enterprises of all sizes, but they have a particular specialty to meet the needs of medium enterprise customers. Collaborative adds skills and credibility in the North American medium enterprise space, where OSV has an established professional services reputation, partly due to OSV’s influence on Workday’s Launch methodology for medium enterprise customers. This complements Collaborative’s medium enterprise business outside of North America and catapults Collaborative’s position in North America, aligning with the company’s geographic expansion roadmap.

We could not be more thrilled to bring OneSource Virtual’s amazing professionals and unique deployment capabilities to the Collaborative Solutions family as part of Cognizant’s Workday business. We truly believe the strong cultural alignment and results-driven focus between the organizations will allow us to bring immediate value to our combined clients and further our position as a market leader in the Workday services space.

— Carroll Ross, Chief Executive Officer, Collaborative Solutions

OneSource Virtual doubles down on its differentiating BPaaS capability

HFS has long been a fan of OSV’s BPaaS offering built on its proprietary Atmosphere platform. A born-in-the-cloud provider, OSV has an established reputation for delivering Workday HCM, especially managed payroll services. In recent years, it added Workday FM to its skillset, with solutions including managed accounts payable automation. BPaaS represents two-thirds of OSV’s business today, boosted by its co-sell agreement with Workday for medium enterprises in North America. OSV developed professional services and AMS businesses with the aim of offering all things to all enterprises. It is now disposing of this additional business to Cognizant, which has the scale and capabilities to deliver an enriched service to Workday customers. OSV gets to re-focus on its initial investment in BPaaS, which remains its main differentiator and core capability in the Workday services market.

OneSource Virtual has seen tremendous growth in our business process as a service (BPaaS) customer base and spent time listening to our customers and the market about what they need when it comes to business services for HR, payroll, and finance and accounting. When the sale closes, OneSource Virtual will focus exclusively on our BPaaS business, delivering our solutions with the aim of enhancing our existing offerings and increasing the speed at which we bring new services and solutions to market.

— Trey Campbell, Chief Executive Officer, OneSource Virtual

The Bottom Line: Collaborative Solutions and OneSource Virtual bolster their respective strengths.

Our research illustrates that Collaborative and OneSource Virtual are strong Workday partners for the HCM and FM solutions for medium and large enterprises. This deal enables these Workday partners to focus on their respective service strengths. By exiting the professional services and AMS market, OSV positions itself as a partner-of-choice for BPaaS services in the Workday ecosystem, and Collaborative strengthens its professional and AMS services capabilities.  The focus on investment, development, and delivery of their chosen service areas is a win-win scenario for customers, who can access strong capabilities and technologies from each Workday partner. Of the two, Collaborative must manage the bigger risk of holding onto the people transitioning over. The talent crunch in the Workday services market means that other partners will try to entice talent away. Workday customers of both partners should consult their account managers for any change in service levels. However, both service partners claim there will be a clean split of customer accounts that should limit any disruption.