Workday has acquired Platfora, a provider of operational analytics and data discovery tools that enable companies to visually interact with and analyze petabyte-scale data in seconds. In short, they bought #BIgData.

According to their blog post the reason they bought Platfora was;

The acquisition will enable Workday to continually enhance our analytics capabilities—especially areas like managerial reporting and operational analytics where insights are gathered by collecting and connecting multiple data sources (Workday and non-Workday data) to make business decisions. Customers want to drill down to transaction-level data and analyze it across multiple dimensions for calculating profitability, ROI, and other operational metrics. For example:

• Retail companies want to analyze profitability using point-of-sale (POS) data for a specific item sold.
• Insurance carriers want to analyze profitability using policy and claims data at the agent level.
• Consumer goods companies want to analyze their supply chain system data at the vendor or brand level for financial planning purposes.