Today at its Workday Rising event, Workday announced a new integration partner: Tidemark, an enterprise performance management company that just came out of stealth last week after changing its name from Proferi. It offers an impressive set of business analytics tools hosted in the cloud, which users will soon be able to access within Workday.

Both Tidemark and Workday have just closed large new rounds of capital. Last week when it came out of stealth, Tidemark announced that it had raised a series B from Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Workday co-founder and co-CEO Dave Duffield, bringing its total raised to $11 million. Yesterday Workday announced that it raised $85 million series F from T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Janus Capital and Bezos Expeditions.

Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe and his co-founder Nenshad Bardoliwalla gave me a demo last week, and the company offers an intuitive look into business metrics with clean visualizations. Still, there are a lot of companies looking to crack that particular nut – easy and intuitive business analytics for the masses – so the Workday partnership is important for them. Tidemark seems like a good fit for Workday, which offers one of the most intuitive ERP packages on the market. Workday’s iPad app seems like a real game changer for the mobile enterprise, and the company just keeps getting more attention. But the embedded business intelligence tools in Oracle Fusion Applications are extremely compelling, and Workday needs something to answer that threat. Adding Tidemark’s slick analytics makes a lot of sense for both parties.

Services Angle

Beyond the integration with Workday, how is Tidemark setting itself apart from its competitors? Everyone says their BI/analytics product is intuitive, democratizes BI and provides actionable insights. It’s really hard to evaluate these sorts of things as a journalist, because it takes real-world use to evaluate how useful and intuitive these things really are. Tidemark looks great, but does it deliver the goods?

One other differentiator is the fact that it’s targeting users from below the C level. “Ultimately, it’s the store manager at Starbucks, the Factory Planner in the warehouse, and the UPS driver that can tell you how likely you are to meeting business objectives. And more important, fix the problems that can derail a business plan,” Sameer Patel wrote about Tidemark.

Also, Tidemark was built for integration and collaboration. The Workday integration is just one manifestation – Tidemark is also partnering with SnapLogic to provide more integrations. These tools need to live inside the software employees use every day to get their work done, and Tidemark is working to make that happen.