‘Workday’ Migrates to the Cloud

How quickly can an online enterprise go global? Just ask Pokémon Go developer Niantic.

The Pokémon Go Lesson

Pokémon Go is the extreme case of a launch outrunning its plans. In a 2016 blog post, Google Cloud, which ran the game’s back end, said Niantic had planned for a certain level of player traffic, with a worst case of about five times that. Actual traffic ran to about 50 times the target, or ten times the worst case, and the surge started within 15 minutes of the game launching in Australia and New Zealand.

The game survived it, but only because its infrastructure could be scaled up fast, with help from Google’s engineers. Pokémon Go went on to become a long-running hit. In March 2025, Niantic agreed to sell its games business, including Pokémon Go, to Scopely for $3.5 billion.

While such immediate virality is rare, predicting user uptake is always a guessing game. Surprises on the upside can trigger an avalanche of negative reviews if the back-end infrastructure doesn’t support viral popularity in multiple markets.

Workday Picks IBM Cloud

Human resources and finance software company Workday recently cited global expansion as a reason for its decision to sign a seven-year contract with IBM to use the IBM Cloud platform for developing and testing new products.

Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri said IBM Cloud will enable his company to scale development and testing faster, and that they may use further services in the future. “Workday will use IBM Cloud to continue accelerating Workday’s internal development and testing efforts to support our ongoing global expansion,” Bhusri said.

IBM’s global cloud data infrastructure includes nearly 50 scalable and security-rich IBM Cloud data centers in 17 countries on six continents, according to a statement by Workday.

It’s worth being clear about what the deal covered. Workday’s customers didn’t move to IBM. The contract was about Workday’s own engineers: the environments they use to build and test new versions of the software before it reaches customers. Development and testing are a natural fit for the cloud, because the need for computing power goes up and down sharply. A big test run might need hundreds of machines for a few hours and then none at all, and renting that capacity is far cheaper than owning it.

Why Infrastructure Can Make or Break Growth

Fast Company notes, “The last thing you want is to start losing customers because your site crashes or some other part of your infrastructure isn’t up to the task.”

For business software like Workday’s, the stakes are different from a game but just as high. Companies run payroll and accounts on it. An outage on payday isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a crisis for every employee waiting to be paid. That’s why expanding into new countries isn’t just about translating the product; it’s about having the infrastructure, and the testing capacity, to keep it running everywhere at once.

What Happened Next

Workday didn’t stop at IBM. In November 2016, just a few months later, Amazon Web Services announced that Workday had selected AWS as its preferred public cloud provider for customer production workloads. That meant customers could, for the first time, choose to run Workday’s applications in the public cloud, which helped with data residency rules. Workday said it would offer the option first to customers in Canada, in 2017.

So Workday ended up using different clouds for different jobs: IBM for development and testing, AWS for running customer workloads, alongside its own data centers. That kind of mixed approach is now common among large software companies.

The global expansion Bhusri talked about also paid off. Workday reported total revenues of $1.57 billion for its fiscal 2017, the year that ended in January 2017. By fiscal 2025, which ended in January 2025, total revenues had reached $8.446 billion.

What It Means for Startups

Most startups won’t face Pokémon Go’s problem. But the lesson scales down. Plan for success as well as failure, and know how you’d add capacity quickly if you needed to. Use the cloud for the jobs where demand swings the most, like testing. And don’t assume one provider has to do everything: Workday’s choices show that picking the right tool for each job can be more important than picking one supplier.

Learn more here about the Workday and IBM Cloud partnership.